Astronomers get best view yet of two merging black holes

The merger of two black holes is a momentous event, revealing the wildest and most extreme configurations of space, time and gravity known to science. Researchers have now gotten their best look yet at such an event based on the detection of ripples in space-time called gravitational waves in an observation that lends strong support to hypotheses from eminent physicists Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The collision occurred 1.3 billion light-years from Earth in a galaxy beyond our Milky Way, and involved two black holes - one about 34 times the mass of the sun and the other about 32 times the sun's mass. They merged in a fraction of a second after orbiting each other at nearly the speed...