It took less than a second for the space observatory hidden in Louisiana woods to detect a black hole that is that is approximately 225 times the mass of the sun.

“It’s the most massive [merger] so far,” says Mark Hannam, a physicist at Cardiff University, UK, and part of the LVK Collaboration, a wider network of gravitational-wave detectors that encompasses LIGO, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan. It’s “about 50% more than the previous record holder”, he says.

New gravitational wave findings from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration report the discovery of the largest black hole merger ever. It could lead to evidence of an extremely rare type of black hole.