Ore Gottlieb

On November 23, 2023, the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detectors caught a gravitational wave from the merger of two black holes with masses of 137 and 103 solar masses. Both fall into the pair-instability mass gap, the range from 69 to 139 solar masses where ordinary stellar evolution leaves behind nothing but expanding gas.

A massive star collapses, and a black hole is born, surrounded by a disk of incandescent plasma. For narrow jets to burst out of this disk, an ordered magnetic field is needed. But inside the star, it's tangled.

In 2017, detectors picked up a tremor in space — gravitational waves from the merger of two neutron stars. At the same moment, telescopes saw a flash. For the first time, one event spoke in two languages at once: light and gravity.

In the silent theater of the cosmos, a star’s life plays out over billions of years. But sometimes an invisible director sneaks onto the stage — a primordial black hole.