Dark Hearts of the Cosmos --Dazzling New Mergers of Black Holes and Neutron Stars dailygalaxy.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailygalaxy.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Astrophysicists Detect Black Holes and Neutron Stars Merging, This Time for Certain
The massive collisions occurred a billion years ago, sending out ripples in spacetime that eventually reached Earth.
Illustration: Carl Knox, OzGrav/Swinburne
A large collaboration of astrophysicists report they have made the first-ever confirmed detections of shockwaves produced by mergers between neutron stars and black holes. The detections, 10 days apart, represent two of these enormous cosmic unions.
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In January 2020, Earth quivered ever so slightly as shockwaves imperceptible to human senses passed through it. Those ripples were gravitational waves, perturbations in spacetime generated by all massive objects but only detectable from extremely huge events, like two black holes colliding. The waves were strong enough to be picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in Louisiana (the Washington branch of the instrument was offline at the time) and the si
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New Delhi: In a first, an international team of scientists, including researchers from India, have confirmed the detection of a collision between a black hole and a neutron star, by analysing the gravitational waves created by two such events in January last year.
Gravitational waves are ripples in the space-time fabric created by extreme events, such as the collision of two blackholes or two neutron stars. While gravitational waves from several such collisions have been detected since the first discovery in 2015, they have all been a result of collision between similar cosmic bodies.
However, now the team has determined that these waves detected last January were a result of a neutron star being swallowed whole by its black hole partner.
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