Series · Gravitational Wave Paleontology Lab

Cosmic Fossils

The first gravitational wave we ever caught lasted two tenths of a second. It came from two black holes colliding 1.3 billion light years away, and it told us their masses and almost nothing else. What kind of stars made them? What were those stars' lives like? The signal does not say. This series is about learning to read what it does not say. Black holes are the fossils of massive stars, the dinosaurs of our Universe, and gravitational waves are the record they press into spacetime. Cosmic Fossils follows gravitational-wave paleontology, the work of reconstructing the lives and deaths of massive stars from the ripples their remnants make when they collide.