“It’s the most massive [merger] so far,” says Mark Hannam, a physicist at Cardiff University, UK, and part of the LVK Collaboration, a wider network of gravitational-wave detectors that encompasses LIGO, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan. It’s “about 50% more than the previous record holder”, he says.

A collision observed between two black holes, each more massive than a hundred suns, is the largest merger of its kind ever recorded, according to new research.

Astronomers have detected the most massive black hole merger ever observed, challenging stellar evolution and black hole formation theories.