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Caption: Some stars leave nothing behind. We’re taught that massive stars explode and leave behind black holes. But for the most massive stars… that might not be true. T… more Some stars leave nothing behind. We’re taught that massive stars explode and leave behind black holes. But for the most massive stars… that might not be true. There’s a decades-old prediction called pair-instability supernova. It suggests that when extremely massive stars die, the explosion is so powerful that it completely obliterates the star. For years, we didn’t have clear evidence that this actually happens. But now, OzGrav researchers at Monash University may have found it… in a very unexpected way. By studying black holes detected through gravitational waves, scientists observed a “mass map” of colliding black holes. A missing range of black holes above about 45 times the mass of the Sun — exactly where pair-instability supernovae predict they shouldn’t exist. And that absence might finally confirm how the most massive stars in the universe die. Check out the paper now: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10359-0 #BlackHoles #Supernova #Astrophysics #GravitationalWaves #Astronomy less
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