Stellar-mass black hole

Assembled from 22 blocks · 1 evidence · 29 related

1. Story
2. The third possible ending, reached when the collapsing core exceeds what neutron degeneracy and nuclear repulsion can support and no known pressure can halt the collapse. Unlike a white dwarf or a neutron star it is not a body with a surface but a region of spacetime from which nothing escapes, characterised by mass and spin alone. The progenitor mass range that produces one is poorly constrained: it depends on how much mass the star loses to winds before collapse, which depends strongly on metallicity, and on whether the explosion succeeds at all. Some massive stars are expected to collapse quietly with no bright supernova, and searches for such failed explosions have so far found them to be faint or rare. This is the one ending of the three whose formation has never been directly witnessed. Not a place on Earth.
3. Knowledge
4. Supernova
5. Stellar-mass black hole
6. Connections
7. Cygnus X-1
8. GW150914 - two black holes merge and the signal reaches Earth
9. Supernova
10. Initial stellar mass
11. The iron peak in nuclear binding energy
12. Giant molecular cloud
13. Neutron star
14. Stellar-mass black hole
15. A guest star appears in Taurus and is recorded in East Asia
16. Baade and Zwicky propose supernovae and neutron stars
17. A pulsar is found inside the Crab Nebula
18. SN 1987A: neutrinos from a collapsing core reach Earth
19. SN 1987A: neutrinos from a collapsing core reach Earth
20. JWST finds the compact object in SN 1987A
21. Evidence
22. Supports the statement that the lower initial-mass boundary for core collapse is theoretically bracketed near 7-11 solar masses with observational progenitor work converging near 8 +/- 1. Author attribution is deliberately omitted because the search summary did not confirm it; neither preprint was fetched.