The “shouldn’t exist” meant directly through star formation:
“Black holes this massive are forbidden through standard stellar evolution models.”
And ofc the obv explanation:
“One possibility is that the two black holes in this binary formed through earlier mergers of smaller black holes." Hannam said.
(Yes, I am the ‘get off my lawn’ of clickbait science articles.)
It’s worth knowing the context that we only have a few hundred black hole merges detected (which are the only practical detections methods of non-supermassive black hole available to us), so there just isn’t enough data for any statistics yet. Scientists are saying here ‘whoa, this is the biggest merger yet detected’.
The “shouldn’t exist” meant directly through star formation:
And ofc the obv explanation:
(Yes, I am the ‘get off my lawn’ of clickbait science articles.)
It’s worth knowing the context that we only have a few hundred black hole merges detected (which are the only practical detections methods of non-supermassive black hole available to us), so there just isn’t enough data for any statistics yet. Scientists are saying here ‘whoa, this is the biggest merger yet detected’.
Thank you. It can be challenging as a lay person to filter out the clickbait aspects of these articles.