{"id":579748,"date":"2026-04-03T14:44:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T14:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/579748\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T14:44:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T14:44:12","slug":"new-study-finds-evidence-of-cosmic-explosions-with-missing-black-holes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/579748\/","title":{"rendered":"New study finds evidence of cosmic explosions with missing black holes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) \u2014 Assistant Professor Maya Fishbach<\/a> and postdoctoral fellows Amanda Farah<\/a> and Aditya Vijaykumar<\/a> \u2014 are part of an international team that has uncovered evidence of a rare type of exploding star, shedding light on one of the most cataclysmic events in the Universe. Their study, published in Nature today<\/a>, confirms that black holes with masses greater than 45 times that of the Sun result from previous black hole mergers, rather than from the collapse of exceptionally massive dying stars.<\/p>\n

Using data from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observatory network, the international team led by Hui Tong<\/a>, a PhD candidate from Monash University\u2019s School of Physics and Astronomy and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), was able to measure the properties of black holes in the \u201cforbidden range\u201d (of over 45 times the mass of the sun) and confirm the theoretical prediction of “pair-instability supernovae.”<\/p>\n

Why are black holes heavier than 45 solar masses so rare?<\/p>\n

At the end of their lives, most massive stars collapse into black holes \u2014 objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape. Presumably, the universe\u2019s most massive stars should collapse to form the most massive black holes. However, some very massive stars become so hot that they are blown apart in a pair-instability supernova \u2014 an explosion so intense that it destroys the star, leaving no core behind that can collapse into a black hole.<\/p>\n

Project lead, Tong, explained that the team\u2019s analysis of gravitational wave signals \u2014 the ripples in the fabric of spacetime \u2014 detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observatory afforded evidence of the existence of the forbidden mass range where stars seemingly don\u2019t make black holes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe observation is well explained by pair instability; there are no stellar-origin black holes in the forbidden zone because stars are undergoing pair-instability supernovae. The only black holes in this mass range are made from merging smaller black holes, rather than directly from stars,\u201d Tong said.<\/p>\n

Confirming the existence of this gap would help settle a major question about how the most massive stars live and die, and the origin of black holes.<\/p>\n

Project collaborator, Fishbach from the University of Toronto and CITA said the study highlights the potential of gravitational waves to probe the lives, deaths and afterlives of the most massive stars in our Universe.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are seeing indirect evidence of one of the most titanic blasts in the cosmos: pair-instability supernovae. At the same time, we are finding that once they are born, black holes can grow via repeated mergers,\u201d said\u00a0Fishbach.<\/p>\n

First predicted in the 1960s, pair-instability supernovae are challenging to distinguish from more common stellar explosions that leave behind black holes. Co-author Farah, who is a CITA postdoctoral fellow, commented: \u201cWe rarely (if ever) get to see these types of explosions in real-time, so it\u2019s amazing that we can observe their lasting imprints so clearly in the gravitational-wave data. These imprints \u2014 the black holes that pair-instability supernovae fail to leave behind \u2014 are already teaching us about nuclear physics. This was one of the early promises of gravitational-wave astronomy, and it\u2019s so exciting to see that promise fulfilled today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another CITA postdoctoral fellow, coauthor Aditya Vijaykumar, expects that these new findings are an important step forward in gravitational wave research: \u201cThe impact of this work is already being felt across the community. It has already sparked a wave of follow-up research, and there are now multiple lines of evidence suggesting that some black hole mergers involve components born in earlier collisions. Such black hole mergers are thought to be produced in regions of the universe that host a dense crowd of stars, and I am excited for all that we will learn about these environments in the future. It is a fascinating time for our field!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) \u2014 Assistant Professor Maya Fishbach and postdoctoral fellows Amanda…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":579749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-579748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579748","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=579748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}