The rumors were true. On Aug 17 at 8:41 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (Aug 18 12:41: Universal Time) LIGO and VIRGO detected a Gravitational Wave coming from the collision of 2 neutron stars of 1.1 and 1.6 solar masses. LIGO/VIRGO immediately alerted other astronomers to look at the region around galaxy NGC 4993 130 million light years away for anything unusual, but the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory had already found a short gamma ray burst from NGC 4993. Soon after that optical astronomers in Chile and the Hubble Space Telescope saw blue spot in NGC 4993 that wasn't there just days before, radio telescopes also saw unusual stuff.
This time the gravitational wave lasted about 100 seconds, the Black Hole collisions they saw before only lasted about a second; at the start of that 100 seconds the 2 stars were orbiting only 200 miles apart. It's not clear if the merged object is a Black Hole or a larger Neutron star, the transition between the 2 is thought to be between 2.5 and 4 solar masses but the exact transition point is not known. But it is thought that the event synthesized and ejected 40 to 100 earth masses of Gold and 10 to 30 earth masses of Uranium. Astronomers were very lucky, all 3 gravitational detectors were online at the same time for only a few weeks but that's when this event happened, and its the closest short gamma ray burst ever found. https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/press-release-gw170817 John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
