This is scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Clara Moskowitz.

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The news last month that gravitational waves had been discovered

made waves throughout the world of science.

The finding from the laser interferometer gravitational wave

observatory, or LIGO, showed that extreme gravity can cause ripples in space time. In the case studied, the

extreme gravity came from two colliding black holes. Now one scientist is

suggesting an added wrinkle that those two black holes might have originated in a single star.

The situation is similar to a pregnant woman that has twin babies in her belly.

Avi Lobe of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

He's proposing the idea in a paper that's been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical

Journal letters.

Lobe became suspicious because just 0.4 seconds after LIGO spotted the gravitational waves, a space

telescope called Fermy glimpsed a bright flash of gamma ray light in the same area of

the sky.

Detecting such a signal is quite surprising from a collision of two black holes.

What could be the source of a flash of light following a black hole merger.

Colliding black holes should not produce such light, but the death of a very massive

star could.

My idea was that if the star is spinning very rapidly to start with, then as its core collapses,

it produces a bar that breaks into two clumps of matter, sort of like a dumbbell configuration.

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