The LIGO Hanford Observatory near the Tri-Cities and its twin in Louisiana detected ripples of time and space passing through Earth from the most massive collision of black holes ever observed, a coalition of the world’s four gravitational wave observatories announced Tuesday.

Black holes are places where gravity is so powerful that nothing — not even light — can escape. Rather than being empty, black holes are chock full of matter that gets squeezed into a teensy space. The idea of black holes was first proposed in 1916,

Black holes are among the most enigmatic and fascinating objects in the universe. Their sheer existence challenges our understanding of the cosmos and raises deep questions about the nature of reality.

The earliest and most distant supermassive black hole discovered thus far by JWST is CEERS 1019, which existed just 570 million years after the Big Bang and has a mass 9 million times that of the sun. That's too big to exist 13.2 billion years or so ago, according to the established models.

1. Black Holes Distort Time and Space Around Them If you happened to fly near a black hole, its extreme gravitational pull would increasingly slow down time and warp space.

Gravitational waves stretch and squeeze the fabric of space and time itself. When space/time is squeezed, pulsar pulses arrive early. When space/time is stretched, the pulses arrive late. The overall stretch and squash is about 1 part in a million billion—or the size of a virus divided by the diameter of the Earth. Very small!

Astronomers at the University of Hawaii uncovered black hole events so packed with energy, they were the biggest explosions seen since the Big Bang.

For years, scientists have theorized that some black holes could actually be wormholes, and a new study shows that this space-time mimicry could in fact be possible.

The Hubble Space Telescope has observed a black hole devouring a star.