Scientists have collected a second burst of gravitational waves sweeping through the Earth.
The warping of space-time was sensed on Christmas Day in the US at the Advanced LIGO laboratories - the same facilities that made the historic first detection in September last year.
Back then, the waves came from two huge coalescing black holes.
This new set of waves, likewise, is ascribed to a black hole merger - but a smaller one.
Reporting the event in the journal Physical Review Letters, the international collaboration that operates LIGO says the two objects involved had masses that were 14 and eight times that of our Sun.
The data indicates the union produced a single black hole of 21 solar masses, meaning they radiated pure energy to space equivalent to the mass of one star of Sun size.
It is this energy, in the form of gravitational waves, that was sensed in the laser interferometers of the LIGO labs in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington State, at 22:38 Eastern Standard Time on 25 December (03:38 GMT, 26 Dec; Boxing Day in Europe).
Source: BBC
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