LIVINGSTON — Ahead of its 10th anniversary celebration in September, Livingston LIGO announced a monumental discovery about black holes earlier this week in Europe.

On Monday in Glasgow, Scotland, representatives from the Livingston facility, a Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, announced that it was one of two sites to detect a black hole 225 times the size of the Sun.

The phenomenon, designated GW231123, was observed in November 2023 and is the largest of its kind to date. The previous record-holder was only 140 times the mass of the Sun.

The most recent discovery, jointly observed by a LIGO facility in Washington, was created by the coalescence of black holes approximately 100 and 140 times the mass of the Sun, Caltech, the cofounders of LIGO, said.

LIGO's director says that these studies are fundamental to understanding primordial forces that make up the universe.

"This observation once again demonstrates how gravitational waves are uniquely revealing the fundamental and exotic nature of black holes throughout the universe," Dave Reitze, the executive director of LIGO at Caltech, said.

The LIGO facility in Livingston previously made history in 2015 when it was the first facility to directly detect gravitational waves. Caltech explained that these ripples in space-time emanated from a black hole merger that created a singularity 62 times the mass of our sun.

LIGO, funded by the National Science Foundation, has since begun working with the Virgo detector in Italy and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector in Japan. This collaboration has collectively observed more than 200 black hole mergers in their fourth run that started in 2023, and about 300 in total since the start of the first run in 2015.