With only one tight pair known, he says, it was difficult to assess how common even
tighter black hole pairs are, which are crucial in the hunt for gravitational waves — a subtle type of radiation predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity.
The LIGO team's analysis suggests these spins were misaligned, indicating that the
pair of
black holes might not always have been together in a
tight binary system but, rather, randomly came together over time.