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12h ago

LIGO’s Loudest Signal Confirms Hawking’s Area Theorem and Kerr Black Holes

Upgraded detectors enabled isolation of multiple ringdown tones to deliver high‑confidence tests of black‑hole theory.

This artist's conception shows events immediately preceding a powerful collision between two black holes, observed in gravitational waves by the U.S. National Science Foundation's LIGO. It depicts the view from one of the black holes as it spirals toward its cosmic partner. The image was released on September 9, 2025. Aurore Simonnet (SSU/EdEon)/LVK/URI/Handout via REUTERS.
Credit: Maggie Chiang for Simons Foundation
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Overview

  • The LIGO‑Virgo‑KAGRA team reports GW250114, a January 2025 merger observed with a network signal‑to‑noise ratio of about 80 by the two LIGO detectors.
  • Analyses show the remnant’s event‑horizon area exceeded the sum of the two progenitors’ areas, corroborating Stephen Hawking’s 1971 prediction.
  • Post‑merger vibrations are consistent with the Kerr spectrum, with the dominant mode and its first overtone isolated to support the no‑hair description by mass and spin.
  • The binary consisted of near‑equal masses of roughly 33.6 and 32.2 solar masses with low spins, yielding a remnant of about 63 solar masses.
  • The results were published in Physical Review Letters with an accompanying arXiv preprint, as the O4 observing run continues with further sensitivity improvements planned.