GRAIHAGH: And it’s lovely that after the
Nobel’s have been awarded for this detection
that we’re now seeing another great breakthrough
in this area. You said that there were other
types of electromagnetics light: x-rays, gamma
rays that were detected, but we were expecting
it to see a few others and we didn’t, like
ice cube in the Antarctic for instance?
MARTIN: We didn’t see neutrinos and what
we’re trying to do now is to do more detailed
calculations to see how surprising it is.
Because the reason that this is such an interesting
event is that we only have theoretical ideas
as to what happens in the very extreme physics
that happens when two of these neutron stars
crash together, merge, and then collapse into
a black hole within a fraction of a second.
It’s very exotic physics and only now are
we really getting some data which allow us
to firm up our ideas and, as you say, we haven’t
seen it in neutrinos. We’ve seen it in x-rays
and we’ve seen it in light, starting off
blue and then getting red. This is very interesting
because there have been some ideas that these
colliding neutron stars are very important
for something which affects us all on Earth.
It’s thought that events like this that
created most of the gold in the universe.
Gold is a very heavy atom, of course, and
it can’t be made by the processes in stars
that make most of the rest of the periodic
table. So it’s been speculated that gold
is one of the elements that are made in these
exotic events, and these events happen about
once every 100 thousand years in each galaxy.
And we are for the first time observing one
and we’ll be able to check whether this
idea is correct by looking directly at whether
the kind of light is what you would expect
if it was producing the conditions for the
gold to be made.
