The black holes – one roughly 140 times the mass of the Sun and the other about 100 solar masses – fused into one pit of infinitely deep darkness 225 times larger than our Sun. The event, called GW231123, took place possibly billions of years ago about between two and 13billion light-years away.

The event is the most massive black hole merger ever recorded by gravitational wave detectors and has forced physicists to rethink their models of how the enormous objects form. The signal was recorded when it hit detectors on Earth sensitive enough to detect shudders in space-time thousands of times smaller than the width of a proton.