“We think it’s unlikely that that was really an astrophysical signal,” Dr. It might have been what they were hoping it was - the rumblings of a black hole-neutron wave collision - or it might have just been random and meaningless jiggles in imperfect data. But one of them, in April 2019, did not hold up under scrutiny. In 2019, two gravitational wave detections appeared to have finally bagged this elusive astronomical quarry. “Why have we not seen a neutron star-black hole system?” “So in effect, we’ve had this mystery question,” Dr. With the help of VIRGO, a similar but smaller European gravitational wave observatory located in Italy, astronomers were able to pinpoint the part of the sky where the explosion occurred, and a series of telescopes were then able to detect particles of light, from radio waves to X-rays, emanating from that fireball.Īstronomers had long expected to find a neutron star orbiting a black hole, but in nearly half a century of searches of our Milky Way galaxy, they never found one. Such collisions create most of the gold and silver in the universe. Two years later, LIGO detected the collision of two neutron stars - the burnt-out remnants of stars more massive than the sun but not large enough to collapse into black holes.
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