this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
88 points (98.9% liked)
science
22598 readers
76 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Very cool paper and I don't want to be the Internet Armchair Astrophysicist, but doesn't the fact that we've already observed a merger show that second-generation black holes are a thing? Or is this evidence that BH mergers (and therefore second-gen BHs) might be more common than we previously thought?
We had seen merges of two first generation black holes but never of this type which would have had at least one other merger prior to this merger detected (either four merged into two merged into one or some other configuration like that). That’s what they mean by hierarchical mergers.
Ah, so the differing spin (and mass) of the merging black holes they just detected indicate that at least one of them was already a second generation black hole, and is evidence for multi-generation hierarchical mergers. That makes sense.