After having quite a few meetings with Jack Dorsey and other board members of Twitter, Elon Musk finally succeeded in adding the social media application to his assets on April 14, 2022. The total cost that he paid to become the owner of Twitter is reported to be $44 billion. Ever since he took over the company, he has been making a few changes in the structure, one of which is dissolving the Twitter board and proclaiming himself as the new CEO.
The Big Reveal
As shocking as it was to some people, the last few weeks saw some major changes happening in the Twitter offices. Musk decided to remove the current board members of Twitter, including Parag Agrawal (Chief Executive Officer), Neg Sagal (Chief Financial Officer), and Vijaya Gadde (Chief of Legal Affairs and Policy and made himself the CEO. This makes Musk the CEO of four big companies he owns, Twitter, SpaceX, Tesla, and the Boring Company. However, Musk has made it very clear that this change is temporary.
The King Starts to Rule
After Musk became the CEO of one of the most used social media platforms, he made some decisions that were not easily accepted by all. In fact, there have been rumors in the town that Musk is planning to downsize and has decided to fire a quarter of the existing team. However, when asked, Musk completely denied this claim and told the press that he has no such plans in mind. It’s very difficult to interpret if the decision of dissolving the entire board and firing people in such high positions was a good decision or not. It’s not clear in what direction Musk is planning to take the company, and the only way to figure that out is by being a bit patient and seeing what Musk really has planned.
Rare Collision of Two Uneven Black Holes Detected at LIGO
Until recently, scientists believed the colliding black holes tend to be evenly matched in size. But now, a new detection at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) pushes that hypothesis aside. On April 12th, 2019, the gravitational wave detectors in the observatory picked up another space-time ripple signal that originated from two colliding black holes. However, upon closer look, the scientists found out that the new detection didn’t match the signals they got from other such collisions.
The Merging Black Holes Were Detected at LIGO
Instead of showing two evenly matched black holes, the new signal was triggered by a merger in which one black hole is way bigger than the other, three or four times bigger, to be exact. Maya Fishbach — a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago who presented the finding — said that it is an unlikely observation that no one on the team was expecting.
Previous Black Hole Mergers Involved Same-Size Objects
The previous ten mergers of black holes that LIGO detected in its first two observing runs were between objects that were about the same size. Regardless of the size of the collision, one of the black holes was never much larger than the other. Now, the new signal is turning that trend on its head.
LIGO had a shorter third observing run, which produced more than 50 detections. The data is enough to have scientists busy for a while, and they’re still analyzing those observations. This means that more unbalanced mergers could be discovered in the near future. One thing is certain though — such an asymmetric merger will definitely expand the range of black hole pairs scientists can expect to see.
The detection will also give scientists a better understanding of the processes that lead to a black holes pair and how rare such unbalanced pairs may be. The new discovery involves objects that existed around 2.4 billion light-years away from our solar system, and while the small black hole was roughly eight times the mass of the sun, the other was nearly thirty solar masses.