Ripples In Spacetime Reveal Mystery Object Colliding With A Star's Corpse
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
A leading gravitational wave observatory recently detected ripples in spacetime that scientists say came from the collision of a dead, superdense stellar remnant and an unknown object.
The stellar remnant is what's called a neutron star; it's what is left when a massive star collapses, leaving only a dense core behind. Neutron stars are some of the densest objects in the universe, with intense gravitational fields-but not as intense as black holes, whose gravity is so strong that not even light can escape their event horizons.
[...] LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detected a gravitational wave signal in May 2023, just days after the observatory resumed operations following some upgrades that reduced the amount of noise in the detector, improving its sensitivity to the subtle perturbations of spacetime.
The unique gravitational wave signal travelled 650 million light-years to get to the LIGO Livingston Observatory in Louisiana. Researchers determined the signal came from the merger of two objects. One of the objects was between 1.2 and 2 times the mass of our Sun, and the other was about 2.5 to 4.5 solar masses. The signal is dubbed GW230529_181500, or GW230529 for short.
The smaller object, the astrophysicists concluded, is probably a neutron star. But the larger object is more massive than any known neutron star, indicating that it may be an itsy-bitsy black hole. Their paper describing the signal and its likely origins is currently hosted on the LIGO website.
The unknown object occupies the apparent mass gap that exists between the heaviest known neutron star and the lightest black hole. Further scrutiny of the collision will indicate whether the unknown object is a low-mass black hole, as the team suspects, or something else.
[...] There are still 80 significant signal candidates that the team needs to sift through. So there are heady days ahead for observing the gravitational universe.
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