A Black Hole Feasted on a Neutron Star. 10 Days Later, It Happened Again. (nytimes.com) 26
In January last year, astronomers definitively observed, for the first time, a black hole swallowing a dead star, like a raven devouring roadkill. Then 10 days later, they saw the same act of scavenging happen again in a different, distant sector of the cosmos. From a report: Those triumphs, reported in a paper published on Tuesday in Astrophysical Journal Letters, are the latest in the still nascent field of gravitational astronomy, which is detecting the literal stretching and scrunching of space-time caused by some of the most cataclysmic events in the universe. "It's the first time that we've actually been able to detect a neutron star and a black hole colliding with each other anywhere in the universe," said Patrick Brady, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who serves as the spokesman for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Further reading: For the first time, astronomers see a black hole eating a neutron star.
It rained, and then ten days later, rained again! (Score:3)
Space is really big and there are lots of black holes and neutron stars. Our detection equipment is getting more sophisticated, so of course we are going to be seeing more of these events. One article I read says they average about 1 merger per month in our observable universe.
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Dear Slashdot editors,
Thanks for linking to a paywalled article.
Incompetent assholes.
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Since most MSM paywalls, including this one, are relatively easy to bypass, one is left wondering who is the true incompetent behind a keyboard here...
Re: Big HMM on that one (Score:4, Informative)
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It sounds a lot like the same event, gravitationally lensed into multiple detections, but brings up the question: Can powerful gravitational sources warp and lens gravity waves?
I would think yes, but that implies interesting effects.
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Pretty sure I've read before that gravity waves can be lensed as well. Can't remember where though.
Gravitational Astronomy (Score:4, Interesting)
The next frontier will be managing to observe primordial gravitational waves, which will give us a whole new window on the earliest moments of the Big Bang, and might answer some big questions about inflationary theory. Gravitational astronomy really is the next frontier of cosmology.
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The instruments are also expensive, and the measurements normally take a long time to collect and analyze, with a few notable exceptions. They effectively guarantee careers long enough to achieve tenure for the few astronomers willing to struggle for the very few available positions.
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Re:Gravitational Astronomy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gravitational Astronomy (Score:5, Interesting)
Gravity waves from inflation are expected to modulate the polarization of the CMB light in a particular way (B-modes) that next generation CMB telescopes hope to detect. So in this case the uinverse is the test mass being influenced by the gravity waves. Thermal gravity waves from the big bang are harder to detect. I haven't yet see a proposed scheme that is practical, but there could be one I'm not aware of.
The impact (Score:2)
Consider the impact -- A billion years later, this event would cause people to reach for their thesauri and put them to work. This summary says, "feasted" another one that was tweeted read "noshed". The first link I found listed 95 synonyms for "eat". So let's just say this black hole "porked out", and after having gorged, probably never bothered to ruminate over all the stories it would generate online.
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The neutron star violated the black hole... sexually
Re: The impact (Score:4, Funny)
Exaggeration! (Score:1)
Of course, French restaurants are known for ridiculously tiny portions, but even they provide many tiny portions.
like a raven devouring roadkill? (Score:1)
Actually, nothing at all like a raven devouring roadkill... but I guess this satisfied some budding author's literary flare.
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Indeed. I think a lot of the public would take astronomy a little more seriously if they eased up on the metaphors.
LIGO ... (Score:1)
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What's the answer? (Score:3)