When you think about astronomy, virtually
everything you've ever heard, everything
you know, is astronomy that's been
learned with a telescope.
And the thing that's so exciting about
this event, is that it's something we've
always known,
we've always predicted, that if you had
light and gravity together the two
pieces of information could tell you
something more. The news of this
detection first came out on the morning
of August 17th. First there were several
emails sent around to members of the
LIGO and VIRGO Scientific Collaborations,
saying that an interesting alert had
been picked up that may or may not have
been a gravitational wave source. What we
were seeing in the signal was the spiral
dance, and eventual death, of a pair of
neutron stars. A neutron star is a
collapsed skeleton of a star. When the star
explodes and dies it compresses down to
something about the size of a city and
the whole star, more or less, is composed
of ultra dense neutrons. But that nuclear
matter that came crashing together also
emits electromagnetic waves, and that's
the amazing thing with this source. For
the first time, we saw this multi -messenger message of combined
gravitational waves and electromagnetic
waves. So right now the thing that we're
worried about is, well what did they
become, what happens to two neutron stars
when they combine, do they make one new
gigantic super neutron star, or do they
become a black hole? We don't know. We may
not be able to answer that from this
first detection.
This is of course an amazing feeling to
have opened up a new field of multi-messenger astronomy. One might say, 'you're
done, okay let's go home!' But in reality
this is just the beginning for us.
Just like when people were first
building telescopes and looking up and
there was amazing things to see, we are
now in an era where we have a new sort
of telescope, and we can look at an
entirely new channel of information. It's
one of the most monumental feats in
modern astrophysics and, decades from now,
maybe even centuries from now, people
will look back at this event and say
this is where it started.
