Gravity: The black hole’s spin drags along the nearby space-time.
The merging entities were about 30 and 8 times the Sun’s mass
For the first time since it started functioning, the gravitational wave observatories at LIGO scientific collaboration have detected a merger of two unequal-mass black holes. The event, dubbed GW190412, was detected nearly a year ago, and this is almost five years after the first ever detection of gravitational wave signals by these powerful detectors. Subsequent analysis of the signal coming from the violent merger showed that it involved two black holes of unequal masses coalescing, one of which was some 30 times the mass of the Sun and the other which had a mass nearly 8 times the solar mass. The actual merger took place at a distance of 2.5 billion light years away. This study has been published in preprint server ArXiv, and is pending peer review.
The detected signal’s waveform has special extra features in it when it corresponds to the merger of two unequal-sized black holes as compared with a merger of equal-sized black holes. These features make i