Your typical black hole merger sounds like a cosmic violin warming up—a gentle “chirp” that builds as two massive objects spiral toward their final dance. GW190521 threw out that playbook entirely. “This doesn’t look much like a chirp,” said Nelson Christensen, a LIGO and Virgo scientist. “This is more like something that goes ‘bang.’”
Detected on May 21, 2019, this gravitational wave came from the collision of two uncommonly massive black holes—85 and 66 times our Sun’s mass—creating a final monster weighing 142 solar masses. That places it squarely in the intermediate-mass black hole category, something scientists theorized about but never confirmed until this moment.
The Wormhole Wild Card
A minority of researchers think this signal might be echoing through a tunnel between universes.
Most scientists interpret GW190521 as two black holes meeting by chance and immediately merging, skipping the usual orbital dance entirely. But a team led by Qi Lai has proposed something far more exotic: what if this “bang” is actually the echo of a black hole collision from another universe, transmitted through a collapsing wormhole?
Their analysis found the wormhole scenario slightly less compatible with the data than conventional explanations—but not by much. While this remains a minority hypothesis, it’s receiving serious academic consideration. If true, GW190521 could represent humanity’s first indirect evidence of a multiverse, fundamentally rewriting our understanding of spacetime itself.
Challenging Everything We Know
This discovery joins other massive mergers that are forcing scientists to rethink black hole formation.
GW190521 isn’t alone in breaking the rules. Recent detections like GW231123—involving a final black hole of 225 solar masses—suggest these massive mergers happen more frequently than existing models predict. The sheer size of these objects challenges everything we thought we knew about how black holes form and grow.
Gravitational wave astronomy is barely a decade old, with the first detection occurring in 2015. Each new signal teaches us something unexpected about the universe’s most extreme phenomena. Whether GW190521 represents conventional astrophysics pushed to its limits or our first glimpse through an interdimensional gateway, it’s already forcing science to expand its horizons beyond anything we previously imagined possible.
