Ever since the first discovery of gravitational
waves back in September 14th 2015, LIGO have
been detecting more and more gravitational
waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime.
The first observation of gravitational waves
was emitted from the inward spiral and merger
of a pair of black holes of around 36 and
29 times the mass of the sun, and was the
first observation of a binary black hole merger.
Recently, LIGO announced another detection
of gravitational waves and this one however,
for the first time, was a neutron star merger
unlike the previous detections that were black
hole mergers.
It was detected on August 17th and lasted
for 100 seconds, which is way longer than
ever before.
It was 130 million light years away, and 130
million years ago when two neutron stars were
orbiting each other and due to their loss
of energy through the emission of gravitational
waves, they spiralled inwards and merged.
Telescopes all around the world detected this
in all areas of the electromagnetic spectrum.
And around 1.7 seconds after the main gravitational
wave detection, NASA’s Fermi gamma ray telescope
identified a burst of gamma rays.
This is fantastic news, because for several
decades gamma ray bursts have been thought
to come from neutron star mergers, but we
lacked any evidence to be sure.
Before any detections made by LIGO, it was
always thought that the main source of gravitational
waves would be neutron star mergers and up
until this detection it has only been black
hole mergers, which is surprising because
the universe, overall, has more neutron stars
than black holes.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there
are more black hole mergers than neutron star
mergers, it could suggest that black hole
mergers tend to produce more prominent gravitational
waves and only now have we had a neutron star
merger close enough and strong enough to detect.
As I’m writing this script, LIGO announced
yesterday yet another detection.
It was detected before the detection I was
just talking about, as it was detected on
June 8th.
It was emitted from two fairly light black
holes, 7 and 12 solar mass black holes, produced
from a distance of about a billion light years
from Earth.
After the black holes coalesced, a black hole
with 18 times the mass of the sun was left
behind, which meant that one solar mass equivalent
of energy was emitted as gravitational waves
during the collision.
This new area of astronomy, has been a very
fascinating one and continues to be so.
We have learned so much from detecting these
minuscule waves.
Every time LIGO improve their detectors, we
hear about more and more detections, and I’m
fairly sure in the very near future that detecting
gravitational waves every month will be a
normality.
Comment down below your thoughts on these
detections.
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day.
