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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 15 2020, @06:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the like-a-christmas-tree dept.

An 'unknown' burst of gravitational waves just lit up Earth's detectors:

Earth's gravitational wave observatories -- which hunt for ripples in the fabric of space-time -- just picked up something weird. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo detectors recorded an unknown or unanticipated "burst" of gravitational waves on Jan. 14.

The gravitational waves we've detected so far usually relate to extreme cosmic events, like two black holes colliding or neutron stars finally merging after being caught in a death spiral. Burst gravitational waves have not been detected before and scientists hypothesize they may be linked to phenomena such as supernova or gamma ray bursts, producing a tiny "pop" when detected by the observatories.

This unanticipated burst has been dubbed, for now, S200114f, and was detected by the software that helped confirm the first detection of gravitational waves.

[...] Astronomers have already swung their telescopes to the interesting portion of the sky, listening in across different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum for a whisper of what might have occurred.

Previously:
LIGO Observes Lower Mass Black Hole Collision
First Joint Detection of Gravitational Waves by LIGO and Virgo
LIGO May Have Detected Merging Neutron Stars for the First Time
GW170104: Observation of a 50-Solar-Mass Binary Black Hole Coalescence at Redshift 0.2
Europe's "Virgo" Gravitational Wave Detector Suffers From "Microcracks"
LIGO Black Hole Echoes Hint at General-Relativity Breakdown
LIGO Data Probes Where General Relativity Might Break Down
Did the LIGO Gravitational Wave Detector Find Dark Matter?
Second Detection of Gravitational Waves Announced by LIGO


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