Astronomy’s ‘Rosetta Stone’: Merging Neutron Stars Seen With Both Gravitational Waves And Light
For the first time, we’ve seen neutron stars merge. At last, the gravitational and electromagnetic sky are one.
“It’s becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics.” -Martin Rees
On August 17th of this year, with both LIGO detectors and Italy’s VIRGO detector all operational, the inevitable happened: the arrival of the final moments of a signal from a distant galaxy, as two neutron stars merged. Although the merger happened in the distant past, gravitational waves move only at the speed of light, and August 17th was the date the final moments of the inspiral and merger occurred from our perspective here on Earth. With three detectors operating at once, we were able to pinpoint the location on the sky where it occurred. Across the world, some 70 observatories trained their eyes on the location, seeing the telltale signs of two neutron stars…
