LLNL physicist Tammy Ma receives excellence in fusion engineering award llnl.gov - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from llnl.gov Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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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.
Explained: What is fusion energy that can meet global clean power demands? msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Massive accelerating objects - such as neutron stars or black holes orbiting each other - would disrupt space-time in such a way that waves of distorted space would radiate from the source.
National Academies calls for a fusion pilot plant
Concept for a tokamak fusion pilot plant. Note figure of a human being at bottom right, giving a sense of scale. Image courtesy of T. Brown, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recently completed two studies that together map out a strategy for the development of fusion energy. The first, issued in 2019, titled “Final Report of the Committee on a Strategic Plan for US Burning Plasma Research,” endorsed a new goal for US fusion energy research and development: a fusion pilot plant. It recommended that the United States should focus its fusion R&D on a minimum-cost device capable of putting electricity on the grid, with the capability of qualifying the technologies required for economically competitive fusion energy.