Astronomers are increasingly drawing back the curtains on black holes. In the past few years, we have finally captured actual photos of these fearsome creatures and measured the gravitational waves – ripples in spacetime – that they create when colliding. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about black holes. One of the biggest enigmas is exactly how they form in the first place.
My colleagues and I now believe we have observed this process, providing some of the best indications yet of exactly what happens when a black hole forms. Our results are published in two papers in Nature and the Astrophysical Journal.
