LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA GWTC-5.0 catalog more than doubles gravitational wave detections to 390 with 161 new black hole mergers
Astronomers can now hear black hole collisions almost routinely. The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA teams released their largest catalog yet: 161 new black hole mergers, more than doubling the all-time tally to 390 confirmed detections. Some proved to be debris from earlier mergers. Per Caltec
For most of scientific history, black hole collisions were completely silent and invisible. A new release shows just how far that has changed. The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, which operates gravitational wave detectors in the United States, Italy and Japan, published GWTC-5.0, the largest catalog of these cosmic events ever assembled, according to Caltech's LIGO Laboratory. The release adds 161 previously unidentified signals from colliding black holes, recorded between April 2024 and the end of January 2025. That more than doubles the all-time count of confirmed gravitational wave detections, bringing the total to 390. When LIGO first directly detected a gravitational wave a decade ago, it was a singular, Nobel-winning event. The field now logs these ripples in spacetime by the hundred. The catalog is not only about quantity. It contains the clearest gravitational wave signal ever recorded, the most precise location ever pinned down for a black hole merger, and the first measurement of three separate vibrational modes ringing from a single black hole, a test of the fundamental physics governing these objects. It also strengthens evidence for second-generation black holes: objects so massive they appear to be the merged remnants of earlier collisions, hinting at dense environments where black holes repeatedly crash together and grow. Taken together, the data marks a shift in how this science is done. Gravitational wave astronomy has moved from detecting rare individual events to surveying whole populations of black holes, letting researchers study how they form and evolve across the universe rather than one collision at a time. Per Caltech's LIGO Laboratory.