One reason for this is because, out of the world's three operational gravitational wave detectors, only one - the LIGO facility in Livingston, Louisiana - was able to spot the event. So far, no other teams have found a flash of light that burst out at the same time as the neutron star merger. This opened up an era of multimessenger astronomy, in which researchers have access to many sources of information about celestial happenings.īut this newly detected event appears to have occurred without an accompanying visible explosion. ![]() After LIGO's first identification of a neutron star merger, a burst of gamma-ray light told scientists that the merger occurred in an old galaxy around 130 million light-years from Earth. ![]() Whenever LIGO senses a potential detection, the observatory sends out an alert to the wider astronomical community, and those researchers immediately train available telescopes on the spot in the sky the facilities identify in the hopes of capturing an electromagnetic flash. A paper with her team's findings (opens in new tab) is set to appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. But now that astronomers know that such beasts exist, it will be up to theorists to explain why these objects seem to show up only in gravitational wave detectors, she said. Why previous telescopes have failed to detect neutron star pairs this massive remains a mystery, Chatziioannou said. ![]() But black holes of such small stature have never been observed before, either. Researchers can't rule out that the merging entities were actually lightweight black holes or a black hole paired with a neutron star, she added. 6) here at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu. "This is clearly heavier than any other pair of neutron stars ever observed," Katerina Chatziioannou, an astronomer at the Flatiron Institute in New York City, said during a press conference Monday (Jan.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |