"It is remarkable that humans can put together a story, and test it, for such strange and extreme events that took place billions of years ago and billions of light-years distant from us," said David Shoemaker, spokesman for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration. The latest black hole collision, resulting in a detectable "chirp" of a gravitational wave, happened when two black holes merged, forming a new one that is about 49 times the mass of the Sun. In an instant, the equivalent mass twice that of our sun was converted directly into gravitational waves — briefly producing more energy than all the energy that is radiated as light by all the galaxies in the universe at any moment, LIGO scientists say. The 2015 events were caused by mergers creating black holes 62 and 21 solar masses in galaxies 1.3 and 1.4 billion light-years away, respectively. David Shoemaker of MIT, and spokesperson for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, the facility where the waves were observed, said in a statement: "We have further confirmation of the existence of stellar-mass black holes that are larger than 20 solar masses – these are objects we didn't know existed before LIGO detected them." A brief history of gravity, gravitational waves and LIGO

A year later, scientists keep listening to gravitational waves, the soundtrack of the cosmos

For the second time ever, scientists detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes The observations are already revealing clues to the nature of black holes – the latest finding suggests that the two black holes in the binary system are not aligned in the way they're spinning, which hasn't been directly observed before. Einstein's general theory of relativity forbids any dispersion from happening in gravitational waves as they move out from their source through space towards Earth. “Even for this new event, which is about two times farther away than our first two detections, we could not find any evidence that gravitational waves disperse as they travel in the fabric of space-time,” Alessandra Buonanno, a University of Maryland physics professor and LIGO collaborator, said in a statement. Because of the greater distance to this merger (twice the distance to the 2015 events), researchers could more easily look for an effect called "dispersion".
Scientists announce that the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has made a third detection of gravitational waves, named GW170104. The signal beam, detected on 4 January 2017, apparently results from a merger of two black holes of 19 and 31 solar masses. Such detections are said to be progressively moving this emerging field in astronomy "from novelty to new observational science".