Thursday, October 22, 2020

They Say M&A Marks The Top

Attach no special importance to "They", it's only in the headline to make a rhyming three-beat.

From Futurism:
Astronomers Claim to Have Spotted the Most Massive Black Hole Merger Ever
"Everything about this discovery is mindboggling."

A team of astronomers have spotted what they claim is the most massive collision of two black holes ever observed.

Prior to the gigantic collision, at least one of the massive colossal space objects had the mass of 85 Suns. The collision itself created a black hole about 150 solar masses — putting it into a mass range previously thought to be possible — and ejected the equivalent of eight solar masses in the form of energy in the form of gravitational waves, as detailed in papers published today in the journals Physical Review Letters and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“Everything about this discovery is mindboggling,” Simon Portegies Zwart, a computational astrophysicist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the research, said in a Nature statement.

The size of the black holes involved in the merger would make them more massive than a regular star, but lighter than the supermassive black holes often found at the center of galaxies....

....MUCH MORE

Well, that's it I guess. It was a good run, what, 13.8 billion years for this iteration of the universe but, like the Nasdaq on March 10, 2000 a top is a top.

Also at Futurism:
Trump Implies That the US Military Could Defeat Aliens If They Show Up