Astronomers have just found the strangest gravitational wave signal so far. This is something that could make scientists rethink everything that they know about the cosmos.
These gravitational waves can be formed when massive objects change the spacetime surrounding them and send ripples across the universe. Scientists were able to catch the first detection of these waves, which were formed by two black holes, which were colliding, back in 2015.
Ever since then, the gravitational wave detections got even weirder than before, and scientists were happy to find out more. A group of researchers recently announced that the first detection of a gravitational wave signal was created by a collision, which involved an object that was larger than the largest neutron star there is, however, smaller than the smallest black hole out there. This entire detection process is too complicated, so scientists don’t believe that they will ever find out precisely what happened. However, the signal gives us hope for even more exciting observations to come. The detection could help us understand how supernovas happen.
Christopher Berry, who is a gravitational wave astronomer at Northwestern University, stated: “It’s a fantastic event, it will really change how we understand the formation of black holes and neutron stars. It will remain a mystery until we can get more observations, but that doesn’t mean it’s not informative. We’re very confident in the results, this is a really beautiful signal. I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw it, it’s stunning.”
Scientists were able to catch the gravitational wave on the 14th of August, 2019, and they were surprised to find out that the initial analysis showed that the collision could have actually happened as a merge between a black hole and the neutron star. The collision of these two objects is actually a type of gravitational wave event which scientists were actually looking forward to since they have only seen mergers of matched pairs.
