The Origins of Black Holes

Artist’s Impression of a black hole in a binary star system. Credit: ESA/Hubble On 15th June 2016 the LIGO collaboration released more detections of gravitational waves. As with the first detection, announced back in February, these gravitational waves were emitted by pairs of black holes, spiralling together and merging, But of course, those black holes need to come from somewhere, and in this case it’s thought to be the deaths of some of the most massive stars in the Universe. To understand more about the deaths of massive stars, and the formation of black holes, I talked to Professor Stephen Smartt, from Queen’s University Belfast, who’s been on the hunt for black holes. Originally broadcast on 30th June 2016 as part of Pythagoras’ Trousers on Radio Cardiff.