When Black Holes Don’t Play by the Rules

A NASA simulation of a black hole binary (Credit : NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell)

Scientists have begun to piece together the origin story of a cataclysmic collision between two black holes that met their fate on an unusual orbital path. The merger, designated GW200208_222617 (that really rolls of the tongue,) stands out among gravitational wave detections as one of the rare events showing clear signs of orbital eccentricity, meaning the black holes followed a squashed, oval shaped orbit rather than a circular one as they spiralled toward their final encounter.

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