When the most massive stars in the universe die, they often detonate in fiery supernovae, dramatically blasting most of their matter into space. The remaining stellar cores collapse into neutron stars and, sometimes, black holes. However, theories suggest that some massive stars might die without a bang, instead directly collapsing inward to become neutron stars or black holes.<\/p>\n
Now, a new Caltech-led study using data from the LIGO\u2013Virgo\u2013KAGRA network of gravitational-wave observatories finds hints of a distinct population of black holes that may have formed from such failed supernovae. While the study did not find direct evidence for failed supernovae, it does show that previous gravitational-wave observations match what theorists had predicted for such a population.<\/p>\n
LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, which consists of detectors in Louisiana and Washington, made history in 2015<\/a> with the first direct detection of gravitational waves<\/a>, or ripples in space-time, from a pair of colliding black holes. Since then, the Virgo detector in Italy and the Kamioka Gravitational-wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan have joined together in one network that has spotted more than 300 black hole collisions<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the most massive stars in the universe die, they often detonate in fiery supernovae, dramatically blasting most of their matter into space. The remaining stellar cores collapse into neutron stars and, sometimes, black holes. However, theories suggest that some massive stars might die without a bang, instead directly collapsing inward to become neutron stars [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247084\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}