Cosmic gulp: Astronomers see black hole swallow neutron star
LA TimesThis illustration depicts a black hole, center, swallowing a neutron star, upper left. For the first time, astronomers have witnessed a black hole swallowing a neutron star, the densest object in the universe — all in a split-second gulp. The black hole “gets a nice dinner of a neutron star and makes itself just a little bit more massive.” The bursts of energy from the collisions were discovered when detectors on Earth spotted the mergers’ gravitational waves, cosmic energetic ripples soaring through space and time as first theorized by Albert Einstein. Science & Medicine ‘We can hear the universe’: Scientists detect gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein More than a billion years ago, in a galaxy far away, two black holes surrendered to one another’s inexorable attraction and collided with such force that it disturbed the very fabric of the universe. Although astronomers had seen gravitational waves from two black holes colliding with each other and two neutron stars colliding with each other, this is the first time they saw one of each crashing together.
History of this topic
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