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Story summary
- A new analysis by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration finds three distinct families of black hole mergers and implies multiple formation channels.
- The largest group, about 79 percent, originates from isolated binary systems.
- The second group, about 14.5 percent, forms in crowded environments like globular clusters.
- The smallest group, about 2.5 percent, involves black holes from hierarchical mergers.
- The study is available on arXiv.
