New technique allows scientists to 'hear' black hole collisions

Scientists have discovered a way to "hear" the collision of black holes and other cosmic events using a process similar to that used in music production.

Experts from the international Ligo, Virgo and Kagra (LVK) collaboration compared the method, which they call astrophysical calibration, to auto-tune software that can correct a singer's pitch if it's off-key to meet the right note.

Similarly, astrophysical calibration enables the sound of large cosmic events to be "heard" even when one gravitational wave detector is slightly out of tune.

The findings are detailed in a paper published as a preprint on arXiv - a research-sharing platform - ahead of publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Dr Christopher Berry, part of the LVK collaboration and an author of the paper, explained: "Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime that stretch and squeeze space.

"They are tiny by the time that they reach the Earth, millions of years after the events that first created them.

"They are not something which we can hear, but our detectors can output the signals as waveforms that we can increase in pitch to listen to, with each signal producing their own distinctive chirp.

"Those chirps encode a wealth of information we can analyse to learn about their sources: their masses, spins, distance, and location."

Signals among the loudest detected

Scientists said the gravitational-wave signals used by the team to develop their technique are among the loudest ever detected by the LVK collaboration.

The first signal, picked up in September 2024, was produced by the collision of two black holes, which were between nine and seven times the mass of the sun and more than a billion light-years away from Earth.

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The second signal, detected in February 2025, was the second-loudest signal from nearly 200 detected by the collaboration since its first detection in 2015.

It was produced by the collision of two black holes between 35 and 30 times the mass of the sun and about 600 million light-years from Earth.

The 'best-quality results'

Researchers hope the results can help future observations and ensure scientists produce the most reliable results.

Dr Daniel Williams, from the University of Glasgow's Institute for Gravitational Research, said: "These discoveries demonstrate that, over our decade of work since the first detection, we have developed a comprehensive understanding of our entire analysis pipeline, from the signals themselves to the detector behaviour.

"In the rare instance that something goes wrong with one detector, we now have robust back-up methods to compensate and leverage data from the other detectors to give us the best-quality results."

(c) Sky News 2026: New technique allows scientists to 'hear' black hole collisions