Gravitational Astronomy

Pac-Man of the Universe

Should we start rethinking black holes as the disposals of the Universe? For the first time, astronomers observed a black hole swallow a dead star. Then, in a surprising reward for their vigilance, the saw it happen again in another part of the Universe 10 days later. In both cases, neutron stars -- the remains of super-massive stars following a supernova when they can't quite manage the mass limit to collapse into a black hole themselves -- disappeared over the event horizons of each black hole.

So far, no record of indigestion other than the emission of gravitational waves, those elusive ripples in space-time, which gave the evidence of the events. So, not only is this stellar meal observed for the first time, there's now another answer to the source question -- Where do gravitational waves come from?

Until now, all identified sources of gravitational waves were twos of a kind: either two black holes or two neutron stars, spiraling around one another before colliding and coalescing.
(SNIP)
By pure coincidence, researchers spotted two of these events within 10 days of one another, the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA collaborations report in the July 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Not only have unions between black holes and neutron stars not been seen before via gravitational waves, the smashups have also never been spotted at all by any other means.

Think of this new discovery of neutron star merging with black hole like the merging between a horse and a donkey making a mule. Only the cosmological mule produced didn't bray. There was no spectacular emission of light, just a dead star disappearing into nothing with no record other than a trembling (kick?) in the fabric of space time. Come to think of that -- pretty spectacular on its own!

I just read two “physics” books recently; The God Equation The Quest for a theory of Everything by Michio Kaku and Fundamentals Ten Keys to Reality by Wilczek, Frank . Both books touch on “Where do gravitational waves come from” and as best I can remember, from concepts I didn’t understand that well to begin with, everything is composed of fields . When you hit a field hard enough with a hammer (add energy) a particle pops out.

I believe the gravity waves are explained as space expanding and contracting? The books are interesting to read back to back, giving slightly different approaches to many of the same topics. Please don’t quote/trust my perversion of what the books say as I have forgotten most (prescribed medications my excuse) but both are entertaining and accessible IMOHO.

>2 DugsBooks: No need to apologize! Just read them because you enjoy them and they make you excited to find out about new things. Remember the physicists studied for years to obtain the understanding that they have. And a large number of them confess that when it comes to quantum dynamics, they don't really understand it; they just take it on faith and try not to think too hard on, "How can that be?"

I just bought myself a treat today (gawd knows when I'll get to it!) because I love reading the new sciences that are a-borning -- chaos theory, consilience (as per EO Wilson), and now synchrony, or how order comes about out of chaos. The book is Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, by Steven H. Strogatz. I'm excited to find out about the next 'new thing'!