Heavy Merger

In the afternoon of August 14th, detectors felt the universe “jiggle” in a way they hadn’t seen before — the possible result of a black hole swallowing a neutron star in a single gulp.
The “jiggles” were gravitational waves — ripples in space and time produced by the motions of extremely dense bodies. They were detected by observatories in the United States and Europe known as LIGO and VIRGO.
These observatories had already seen mergers between pairs of black holes, and pairs of neutron stars. They’d even seen one possible merger involving one of each, but the signal was too weak to confirm.
The signal in August was much stronger. Analysis showed that it was the result of a merger of an object more than five times the mass of the Sun with another less than three times the Sun’s mass. The heavier object has to be a black hole, while the lighter one is most likely a neutron star — the ultra-dense corpse of a once-mighty star. The merger took place almost 900 million light-years from Eart