Scientists have confirmed the theories of Einstein and Hawking about the nature of black holes

An international group of physicists has published a paper in Physical Review Letters (PRL) that provides the most convincing evidence to date that black holes behave in exact accordance with Einstein's general theory of relativity and that Stephen Hawking's key assumptions about their nature are confirmed.

Billions of years ago, when the Earth was inhabited only by microscopic organisms, two black holes located about 1.3 billion light-years from the Solar System slowly spiraled closer until they merged into a single massive black hole. At the same time, powerful perturbations of space-time arose — gravitational waves.

In January 2025, these waves reached the Earth and were recorded in the LIGO experiment (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory). This was the most accurate direct observation of gravitational waves in the history of science and confirmed Hawking's 54-year-old theorem that black holes grow with increasing mass. At the same time, the results confirmed the "no hair theorem", a key property of black holes.

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The merger occurred between objects with a mass of about 33 and 32 solar masses. The gravitational waves emitted in this case spread throughout the universe in all directions; some of them were detected by LIGO detectors under the GW250114 index. Analysis of the signal allowed scientists to determine the initial parameters of the black holes and find out that the formed object has a mass of about 62 times that of the sun. The area of the event horizon before the merger was about 240 thousand square kilometers, and after that — about 400 thousand square kilometers.

These data confirmed Hawking's 1971 prediction of event horizons—boundaries beyond which nothing, including light, can escape the gravitational field of a black hole.

Over the past ten years, LIGO, together with the Virgo observatories in Italy and KAGRA in Japan, have identified about 300 suspected black hole mergers. Now such events are recorded about once every three days. In November, LIGO will undergo a multi-year upgrade, which should increase its sensitivity by another 25%.

NASA astronomers discovered a wandering black hole on May 13. For the first time, scientists have recorded an unusual event not in the center of the galaxy, but outside it.

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