{"id":575915,"date":"2026-04-01T20:56:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T20:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/575915\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T20:56:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T20:56:11","slug":"a-cosmic-dead-zone-for-black-holes-is-real-new-evidence-suggests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/575915\/","title":{"rendered":"A Cosmic ‘Dead Zone’ for Black Holes Is Real, New Evidence Suggests"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recent LIGO catalog update<\/a> more than doubled the number of confirmed gravitational wave signals\u2014ripples in spacetime caused by cataclysmic events. And already, astronomers are arriving at some shocking conclusions from picking apart the revamped dataset.<\/p>\n

In a Nature<\/a> paper published today, researchers confirmed the first evidence for pair-instability supernovas, doing so with gravitational waves. These unique supernovas emerge when very massive, steaming-hot stars go out in a thermonuclear explosion that eradicates the star, leaving nothing behind for anything else to form nearby, let alone black holes. Scientists long theorized that black holes could not form within this \u201cpair-instability gap,\u201d predicted to range from 50 to 130 times the mass of the Sun. But finding solid evidence for these explosions proved to be difficult\u2014until now.<\/p>\n

\u201cPair-instability supernovas have been hard to confirm through direct light-based observations because they are rare, distant, and leave little direct trace that can be uniquely identified,\u201d Hui Tong<\/a>, the study\u2019s lead author and a PhD student at Monash University in Australia, told Gizmodo.<\/p>\n

Gravitational waves, on the other hand, allow for an \u201cindirect\u201d tracing of stellar explosions, Tong added, meaning researchers now have a way to \u201creconstruct the outcomes of stellar explosions indirectly, through the population of black holes they leave behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tracking the invisible <\/p>\n

Since its Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves in 2015<\/a>, the LIGO Collaboration has consistently picked up on some truly perplexing signals. Last summer, it announced the detection of the most colossal merger ever found, the final product of which was a gigantic black hole more than 225 times the mass of the Sun.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Other than its sheer size, the monster black hole\u2019s parents appeared to lie within the pair-instability gap, at 103 and 137 times the mass of the Sun, respectively. The discovery demonstrated to astronomers the potential of gravitational waves in studying \u201cinvisible\u201d phenomena like black holes, as well as the need to reevaluate our understanding of the theoretically impossible<\/a> in black hole astronomy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe detection of gravitational waves allows us to \u2018hear\u2019 the violent collisions of the most compact objects in the universe,\u201d Tong explained. That has \u201copened a new window on the universe,\u201d he added, \u201crevealing populations of black holes that were previously inaccessible and reshaping our understanding of how massive stars live and die.\u201d<\/p>\n

(The video below isn\u2019t directly related to the new findings, but shows what Tong means by gravitational waves allowing us to \u201chear\u201d violent collisions in the universe.)<\/p>\n

Surveying ripples across spacetime <\/p>\n

To be clear, the latest study addresses the feasibility of pair-instability supernovas altogether. The announcement from last year discusses a black hole of two black holes with masses within the gap presumably created by pair-instability supernovas. So the two findings slightly differ in focus but are inherently related in our quest to understand the many unknowns of stellar evolution.<\/p>\n

For the new study, Tong and colleagues performed a statistic analysis of the \u201ccosmic census\u201d of black holes based on LIGO data. According to Tong, their primary goal was to \u201ctest whether there is a shortage of black holes in merging systems at certain masses, as predicted by pair-instability physics, and what this might tell us about how black holes and their parent stars form and evolve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their investigation presented an \u201cunambiguous\u201d gap in the distribution of secondary masses\u2014the smaller of two black holes in mergers\u2014between roughly 44 and 116 times the Sun\u2019s mass, according to the paper. Fascinatingly, this observation allowed the team to indirectly trace its way back from the remnants (black holes) to the dying star (supernovas).<\/p>\n

Stay tuned (literally) <\/p>\n

Tong told Gizmodo that the new findings still need to be tested further for astronomers to understand the gap\u2019s exact shape and physical mechanisms. For Tong, the most remarkable aspect of the findings is how quickly things are progressing in gravitational wave astronomy. Before 2015, \u201cwe had no direct way of knowing whether black holes with masses of tens of times the mass of the Sun existed at all because these systems are essentially invisible in light,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But now, LIGO and its partners pick up on hundreds of gravitational wave candidates\u2014almost daily, at that<\/a>\u2014giving researchers a constant stream of information to test hypotheses like never before. When the next generation of gravitational wave observatories fire up in the 2030s, we could be looking at tens of thousands of signals per year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis would be a major leap forward,\u201d Tong said. \u201cWith this much richer view, we will be able to compare different ideas for how massive stars live and die and connect the observed black hole population directly to the physics of stellar structure and nuclear reactions. In this way, gravitational waves will become a powerful tool for understanding how the most massive stars shape the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A recent LIGO catalog update more than doubled the number of confirmed gravitational wave signals\u2014ripples in spacetime caused…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":575916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[2035,49,48,73082,71,314,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-575915","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-black-holes","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-gravitational-wave","12":"tag-ligo","13":"tag-physics","14":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/575916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}