There’s a "no-fly zone" in outer space where black holes of a certain size just aren't allowed to exist.
April 3, 2026
Original Paper
Low-mass failed supernovae and the 10 M_sun peak in the merging black hole mass distribution
arXiv · 2604.01420
The Takeaway
New gravitational wave data shows a weird gap around 10 to 16 times the mass of our sun where black holes seem to vanish. This implies that when stars die, they don't just collapse into any size, but skip over an entire weight class.
From the abstract
Gravitational-wave observations reveal that the rate of merging black holes drops by $\sim2$ orders of magnitude from component masses $\sim 10\,M_{\odot}$ to $\sim 15\,M_{\odot}$. The increased compactness of the black hole progenitor cores may contribute to the $\sim 10\,M_{\odot}$ overdensity, but cannot fully explain the rate difference. In this paper, we consider the possibility that the overdensity is reinforced by supernova processes that result in efficient black hole formation from dire