More than 2,000 scientists around the world work together to detect and analyze gravitational wave events. There's another in Italy, called Virgo, and one in Japan called KAGRA, although it was not online during these detections. has two of these detectors, funded by the National Science Foundation, that together are known as LIGO. The detectors are able to catch changes in length that are so subtle, they're a fraction of the width of a subatomic particle. When a gravitational wave passes through the devices, it warps space and changes the length of the lasers' paths. These L-shaped giants send lasers down pipes that are more than 2 miles long. The chance to understand this kind of cosmic activity is why researchers spent decades designing and building gravitational wave detectors.
#BLACKHOLE SWALLOWS BLACKHOLE UPGRADE#
Upgrade of wave detectors may detect more weirdness Within 1 billion light-years of Earth, it happens roughly once per month.
He calculates that a black hole eats a neutron star roughly every 30 seconds somewhere in the whole observable universe, though scientists would have to be looking in the right place with the right kind of equipment to detect it. "It's like flipping the sound on, on a silent movie, or something like that." And then, you know, with gravitational wave astronomy, which only really started five or six years ago, we suddenly have this brand new channel of information," says Chase Kimball, a graduate student at Northwestern University. "Throughout all of human history, since we've been looking up at the stars, we've been gathering information just based off of the light that we see. Space Earth Sees 1st Image Of A Black Hole
While scientists have previously used these detectors to spot a couple of black holes merging, and a pair of neutron stars colliding, never before have they had a chance to see what happens when these two different kinds of beasts encounter each other. What happens when strange meets stranger in the cosmos Their noshing happened about 1 billion years ago but was so intense that it shook space-time and sent out ripples that only recently hit the Earth, triggering giant detectors built to sense these waves. Researchers found not just one, but two black holes making snacks of neutron stars. The new find, described Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, shows how the very fabric of the universe gets roiled when the two come together. An artistic image of what happens when a monstrous black hole collides with - and gulps down - a neutron star the size of a large city.Ī black hole swallowing a neutron star - a star more massive than our sun but only about the size of a city - has been observed for the first time ever.Įach of these space monsters is among the most extreme and mysterious phenomena in the universe.
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