First, this article talks about a mass gap, not a mass ceiling. E.g. stars between 50-130 solar masses shouldn't form black-holes, they should explode. The bet

First, this article talks about a mass gap, not a mass ceiling. E.g. stars between 50-130 solar masses shouldn't form black-holes, they should explode. The bet is about finding black holes in this gap. Second, the issue is LIGOs first 100 detections, not all detections. We know black holes in the mass gap could form by other means such as absorbing other black holes, it was assumed that this type of formation would be rare enough that it would not occur in the first 100 black holes detected by LIGO. So that was the bet, and the loss of the bet was the occasion to write the article. Unfortunately, while all this information is in the article, several misleading points are also in the article: * The headline of "a Black Hole So Big It ‘Should Not Exist'" is misleading * The diagram is equally misleading, not showing a gap but a ceiling * The mention of this only applying to the first 100 detections is buried at the end of the article, as is the fact that people are well aware that black holes can form via absorption and so enter the gap. The article makes it look like existing knowledge of black hole formation is being challenged, when what is basically a statistical bet about 100 observations has been settled. The combination of over simplification and sensationalization is a problem with mediocre science writing, of which this article is unfortunately an example.