[ExI] Gravitational waves made by colliding neutron stars found

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2017 8:39 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: [ExI] Gravitational waves made by colliding neutron stars found

 

>…The rumors were true. On Aug 17 at 8:41 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (Aug 18 12:41: Universal Time) LIGO and VIRGO detected a Gravitational Wave coming from the collision of 2 neutron stars  of 1.1 and 1.6 solar masses. LIGO/VIRGO immediately alerted other astronomers to look at the region around galaxy NGC 4993 130 million light years away for anything unusual, but the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory had already found a short gamma ray burst from NGC 4993. Soon after that optical astronomers in Chile and the Hubble Space Telescope saw blue spot in NGC 4993 that wasn't there just days before, radio telescopes also saw unusual stuff…

 

 

This go-around yielded more science than everything we have done in space combined methinks.  I admit to having been an early critic of the LIGO notion: skeptical we would ever see anything.  Well, I ain’t no more.  I have been blown away repeatedly, and learned more physics than at any time before: I reviewed all that crazy-difficult General Relativity stuff, then this latest WOWSers!  I would have thought we would be waiting a hundred years between neutron star mergers, perhaps a thousand black hole collisions between every neutron pair merger.

 

Then this happens, oh what a time.  The 2017 triumphs of computational astronomy more than makes up for all the political heartbreak and craziness of 2016, makes up for it 100 times over.  Life goes on.  More mergers coming, more physics to learn, ooooh so cool it is, so cool.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

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