Call it the astrophysical equivalent of King Kong versus Godzilla: Scientists have spotted two instances in which a black hole has consumed a neutron

Ripples in spacetime reveal black holes slurping up neutron stars

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2021-06-30 01:00:05

Call it the astrophysical equivalent of King Kong versus Godzilla: Scientists have spotted two instances in which a black hole has consumed a neutron star, the superdense sphere of nuclear matter left behind when a middle-weight star burns out and blows up. The violent mergers between the massive objects were detected through the ripples in space and time, or gravitational waves, that the crashes emitted. Previously, scientists had spotted black hole-black hole or neutron star-neutron star mergers and had anxiously awaited detecting such mixed pairs.

“Most people suspected that there were black holes merging with neutron stars, but this is the first time that we’ve confidently seen exactly that,” says Maya Fishbach, a gravitational wave astronomer at Northwestern University, who helped make the discovery. For both events, however, astronomers saw no visible light or other electromagnetic radiation, leaving them pining for a merger in which a black hole strews a neutron star’s luminous guts across the sky and helps reveal its secrets.

Five years ago, physicists first detected gravitational waves, which were emitted when two massive black holes spiraled together and melded. That discovery was made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)—a pair of massive optical instruments in Louisiana and Washington state, which uses laser beams to measure the stretching of space with mind-boggling precision.

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