Gravitational waves help track newborn black hole's speed, direction
A research team based in Spain just pulled off something big—they've measured both the speed and direction of a newborn black hole, all by studying gravitational waves from a 2019 cosmic smash-up.
This leap forward, published in Nature Astronomy, shows how these space ripples can reveal details about mysterious objects far beyond what we can see with light.
'New era of black-hole astronomy'
For the first time, researchers found that this new black hole shot away at over 50km per second—fast enough to leave its star cluster behind.
Researcher Koustav Chandra of Penn State called it "a new era of black-hole astronomy," since tracking these kicks with just gravitational data could help us connect the dots between invisible cosmic events and signals we can actually detect on Earth.