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GW170817/GRB Neutron Star Collision may have Created the Smallest Known Black Hole

posted by martyb on Thursday June 07 2018, @11:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-big-is-that-in-Libraries-of-Congress? dept.

takyon writes:

Okay, Last Year's Kilonova Did Probably Create a Black Hole

In August of 2017 [open, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.161101] [DX], another major breakthrough occurred when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected waves that were believed to be caused by a neutron star merger. Shortly thereafter, scientists at LIGO, Advanced Virgo, and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope were able to determine where in the sky this event (known as a kilonova) occurred.

This source, known as GW170817/GRB, has been the target of many follow-up surveys since it was believed that the merge could have led to the formation of a black hole. According to a new study by a team that analyzed data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory since the event, scientists can now say with greater confidence that the merger created a new black hole in our galaxy.

[...] While the LIGO data provided astronomers with a good estimate of the resulting object's mass after the neutron stars merged (2.7 Solar Masses), this was not enough to determine what it had become. Essentially, this amount of mass meant that it was either the most massive neutron star ever found or the lowest-mass black hole ever found (the previous record holders being four or five Solar Masses).

Previously: "Kilonova" Observed Using Gravitational Waves, Sparking Era of "Multimessenger Astrophysics"
Neutron-Star Merger Grows Brighter

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @12:47AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @12:47AM (#690135)

    In August of 2017 [open, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.161101] [DX], another major breakthrough occurred when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected waves that were believed to be caused by a neutron star merger. Shortly thereafter, scientists at LIGO, Advanced Virgo, and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope were able to determine where in the sky this event (known as a kilonova) occurred

    This is very misleading. First came the kilonova detection, then they went back and found a previously rejected signal in the ligo data.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @01:05AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @01:05AM (#690141)

      On 2017 August 17 12:41:06 UTC the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM; Meegan et al. 2009) onboard flight software triggered on, classified, and localized a GRB. A Gamma-ray Coordinates Network (GCN) Notice (Fermi-GBM 2017) was issued at 12:41:20 UTC announcing the detection of the GRB, which was later designated GRB 170817A (von Kienlin et al. 2017). Approximately 6 minutes later, a gravitational-wave candidate (later designated GW170817) was registered in low latency (Cannon et al. 2012; Messick et al. 2017) based on a single-detector analysis of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Hanford data. The signal was consistent with a BNS coalescence with merger time, tc, 12:41:04 UTC, less than $2\,{\rm{s}}$ before GRB 170817A. A GCN Notice was issued at 13:08:16 UTC. Single-detector gravitational-wave triggers had never been disseminated before in low latency. Given the temporal coincidence with the Fermi-GBM GRB, however, a GCN Circular was issued at 13:21:42 UTC (LIGO Scientific Collaboration & Virgo Collaboration et al. 2017a) reporting that a highly significant candidate event consistent with a BNS coalescence was associated with the time of the GRB959 .

      http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa91c9/meta [iop.org]

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday June 08 2018, @09:11AM (1 child)

      by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Friday June 08 2018, @09:11AM (#690253) Homepage
      You're failing to take relativity into account. If it takes 6 minutes to get your message out, which is still considered low latency in the field, then other people will think you detected it later, even if you detected it 2 seconds before. Fermi's little more than a geiger counter in comparison to the processing that LIGO requires, of course it auto-reported a blip to the outside world more quickly.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @12:23PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @12:23PM (#690283)

        That's not the point. The point is they want it to seem like ligo detected this then told other scientists "go check this out", thus proving ligo is useful and works. That's what we all wish happened but unfortunately no. The other teams had to tell ligo to go dig through their data and see if they saw anything at such and such time. Then ligo did find something and said "yep we got it, thanks for verifying our results!"

        And anyway you are totally wrong, there was no 6 minute lag due to relativity.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @04:31AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @04:31AM (#690200)

    That's a tight hole.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday June 08 2018, @05:19AM (1 child)

      by maxwell demon (1608) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 08 2018, @05:19AM (#690214) Journal

      Indeed, it's smaller than Uranus (but much more massive).

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @05:27AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @05:27AM (#690217)

        You are full of shit. How tight is Uranus?

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 08 2018, @04:58AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday June 08 2018, @04:58AM (#690208) Journal

    And thus the Microsoft Technical Support Help Line was born...

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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