Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Cool Stuff Ride Home, of course, where we bring you some of the cooler stories from around the world.

I'm Marcus Paffett on today's episode.

A whole lot of black holes.

First, scientists have detected the largest black hole merger ever.

Plus a paperclip sized spacecraft traveling to a black hole to study it,

science fiction, or perhaps actual science. Details coming up. Those stories plus a look at this day

in history coming up on cool stuff. This story comes to us from live science and author Ben Turner.

Scientists have detected the biggest black hole merger ever known.

A gigantic collision from two massive spacetime ruptures spiraling into each other.

And it could hold evidence of the most elusive type of black hole in the universe.

The merger, which happened on the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy,

produced a black hole roughly 225 times more massive than the sun.

That's nearly double the previous record holder,

which spawned a final black hole with a mass of around 142 suns.

The new collision was found by the LIGO Virgo-Cagra LVK collaboration.

That's a group of four detectors that identify cataclysmic cosmic events

from the gravitational waves that spill out in their wakes.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space time,

first predicted to exist by Albert Einstein and confirmed by LIGO in 2015. For their groundbreaking

discovery, physicists involved with the research earned a Nobel Prize in 2017. But most intriguing

to the scientists are the two black holes masses, approximately 100 and 140 times that of the sun.

As was the case with the previous detection, black holes of these sizes fall into a quote-unquote mass gap that challenge conventional wisdom on how the spacetime ruptures form.

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