Way to headline.

The numbers in the article suggest a violation of conservation of mass:

> Today, the LIGO Collaboration announced the detection of the most colossal black hole merger known to date, the final product of which appears to be a gigantic black hole more than 225 times the mass of the Sun.

> GW231123, first observed on November 23, 2023, seems to be an unprecedented beast of a black hole merger. Two enormous black holes—137 and 103 times the mass of the Sun—managed to keep it together despite their immense combined mass

Is the explanation here "225 is a nice round number, and 240 is technically 'more than' that", or "a lot of mass evaporates into other forms of energy when black holes merge", or "during a merge, it becomes possible for matter to escape an event horizon", or what?

Title needs an edit (maybe the clickbait algo): Astronomers Detect a Black Hole Merger That’s So Massive It Shouldn’t Exist - although, it's not a great title.

Our understanding of this universe constantly changes. We all know those - Earth is flat or it is center of universe, on and on.

The black hole is happening. So it exists. So either the observations are wrong or the undeying assumptions are wrong or math / physics we are using to make sense of the event is wrong.

Click-bait articles serve no purpose in advancing science.

Greg Egan's Diáspora starts with the merger of two neutron stars, and that causes a lot of trouble in this side of the galaxy, don't want to imagine what would it be with 2 massive blackholes for the nearby galaxies.

It’s impressive how LIGO and Virgo keep pushing the limits of what we thought was possible. Each new event seems to open more questions than it answers.

I don't get it. There are black holes that have millions of sun masses. The current theory is that these were formed by many consecutive mergers. What then makes this 225 sun mass merger so large that it shouldn't exist?

225 solar masses… that's just wild. We keep building these models that tell us mergers like this shouldn't happen, and the universe keeps dunking on them

The article fails to explain why this event challenges our understanding of black holes. Did we expect such big masses to spiral for much longer or something? Why was this collision supposed to stay unstable?

Can someone explain how is it possible for black holes to even collide? Wasn't the usual expanation that time goes faster (for you, slower for outside observer) as you approach the black hole singularity and that it stops exactly as you "get there"? If this is true the black holes never actually collide. They just endlessly spin closer and closer. For the outside observer it taking infinite time before they actually "touch"?

Or do we just call it a collision if they simply get as close to each other as to be within the event horizon of the other?

If the former and we see these true collisions, how is it not a proof the age of the universe is infinite ? If we see events that are supposed to take infinitely long to occur?

All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place.