Cosmic Gold Mine: New Catalog Unveils a Lost World of Black Hole Mergers
Astronomers released GWTC-5, a catalog with 161 new gravitational-wave signals from black-hole mergers detected by LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA between April 2024 and January 2025, bringing total detections to 390. The haul includes second-generation mergers and the most precisely localized event to date, enabling improved measurements of the Hubble constant and tests of general relativity and Hawking’s area theorem, underscoring a growing, detailed view of black hole populations and their growth in the universe.