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Black Hole Detected Gobbling a Neutron Star

posted by martyb on Tuesday August 20 2019, @07:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-proton-and-a-neutron-star-walk-into-a-black-hole dept.

RandomFactor writes:

This past Wednesday (and about 900 million years ago), for the first time according to scientists at Australian National University (ANU) gravitational-wave discovery machines detected a black hole swallowing a neutron star

Professor Susan Scott, from the ANU Research School of Physics, said the achievement completed the team's trifecta of observations on their original wish list, which included the merger of two black holes and the collision of two neutron stars.

"About 900 million years ago, this black hole ate a very dense star, known as a neutron star, like Pac-man—possibly snuffing out the star instantly," said Professor Scott, Leader of the General Relativity Theory and Data Analysis Group at ANU and a Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav).

Professor Scott notes that there is an alternative, but unlikely, possibility as well

there is the slight but intriguing possibility that the swallowed object was a very light black hole—much lighter than any other black hole we know about in the Universe. That would be a truly awesome consolation prize.

[...] The ANU SkyMapper Telescope responded to the detection alert and scanned the entire likely region of space where the event occurred, but we've not found any visual confirmation.

The scientists continue to analyze the data and search for the event in the sky and expect to publish the final results once complete.

Also at c|net.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @08:00PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @08:00PM (#882759)

    just kidding.
    there's nothing really saying that observing a "single atom" will tell you anything about the wider universe.
    so anything "app"-ly like where future galileo's want to care about more then what uni monies flows support is a "good thing(tm)" ofc nobody really remebers the dude supplying the self scraped glass to galileo.. or for that matter the "special" sand supplied via "trade center genoe" to melt with german 1'000 years old cedar (you know, the biggg logs the chinese sailors from "sinboao" tried to steal but failed) .. or such? right? right?

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @09:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @09:31PM (#882797)

    Before Epstein was charged with unlawful sexual activity with a minor, Stephen Hawking visited the island with of a group of particle physicists, cosmologists and theorists, including three Nobel laureates and experts on gravity, dark matter and string theory.[18][6] All had been invited to attend a conference funded by Epstein.[18] A March 2006 photograph on Little St. James shows Hawking, David Gross and Lisa Randall at a barbecue during the conference.[6][7] Other visitors have included Gerard 't Hooft, Frank Wilczek, Lawrence Krauss and Martin Nowak.[7] Krauss said most of the conference took place on the neighbouring island of St. Thomas, but Epstein had thrown a party on Little St. James.[18]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Saint_James%2C_U.S._Virgin_Islands [wikipedia.org]
    Can you find a free source for ref 18?