An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics
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The collision of two → black holes in a → binary black hole system once they come so close that they cannot escape each other's gravity. They will merge in an extremely violent event to become one more massive black hole. The merger would produce tremendous energy and send massive ripples, called → gravitational waves, through the → space-time fabric of the Universe. Such an event (called GW150914) was first detected by the → Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) on September 14, 2015. The initial black hole masses were 36 and 29 Msun which gave a final black hole mass of 62 Msun, with 3 Msun radiated in gravitational waves. The event happened at a distance of 1.3 billion → light-years from Earth (Abbott et al., 2016, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 061102). Black hole merger is preceded by → inspiral and followed by → ringdown.

→ black; → hole; → merger.