'Lost World' of Gravitational Waves Reveals The Origins of Black Holes

The Many Ways to Build a Black Hole

The Many Ways to Build a Black Hole: Gravitational waves point to a multifaceted assembly line for the cosmic oddities

'Lost World' of Gravitational Waves Reveals The Origins of Black Holes

Of all the objects in the Universe, few are as perplexing as black holes.

The Universe Builds Black Holes in More Than One Way, and We Now Have Proof

The count stands at 267. That is the number of confirmed gravitational-wave events pulled from detector data stretching back nearly a decade, 267 separate moments when two massive objects collided somewhere in the observable universe and sent ripples across spacetime that arrived at Earth as barely-detectable distortions smaller than a proton. For years, each detection was its own occasion, its own announcement. Something has changed. The catalo…

The Universe is creating black holes in many different ways

When black holes collide, they do not all seem to follow the same cosmic script. A sweeping new analysis of the latest gravitational-wave catalog suggests the universe is producing merging black hole pairs through several distinct channels, not one. Some of those systems appear to come from ordinary stellar evolution, while others carry signs of stranger histories, including black holes that may already be the remnants of earlier mergers. The st…