On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 1:32 PM Lawrence Crowell <
[email protected]> wrote:

>> Yesterday August 14 2019 LIGO detected for the first time Gravitational
>> Waves coming from a Black Hole-Neutron Star merger; it was 900 million
>> light years away. They detected something like this a few months ago but
>> were only 13% confident it was real, this time the signal was much stronger
>> and they're 99% confident. They've narrowed the source down to a square 23
>> degrees on a side, so far they haven't detected any electromagnetic waves
>> from it but have just started looking. This type of merger produces a
>> cleaner signal that is easier to analyze than when two Black Holes merge
>> and can provide a more rigorous test of General Relativity, and if you
>> could spot a few dozen of these sort of mergers it could give us the best
>> value yet of the Hubble constant which has been in dispute lately and
>> perhaps tell us if we're heading for the Big Rip or not.  John K Clark
>> LIGO and Virgo spotted the first black hole swallowing up a neutron star
>> <https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ligo-virgo-gravitational-waves-first-black-hole-swallowing-neutron-star>
>>
>
> *> I am not sure how this is cleaner, for there is a lot of material
> dynamics that is complicated. Black hole coalescence is a pure vacuum
> problem. It is though interesting still. *
>

If a big thing and a small thing merge you could make certain
approximations that wouldn't work if the two things were of equal size, and
if the Black Hole was large enough the tidal forces wouldn't be strong
enough to break up a Neutron Star until after it passed through the Event
Horizon so the material dynamics of the star would have no effect on the
signal that we see. If the Black Hole was smaller then the Neutron Star
would break up on our side of the Event Horizon making the signal more
complex, but that would give us information about the nature of Neutronium
and, other than with glitches with Pulsars caused by starquakes, it is the only
way we have to compare theory with reality because we can't make Neutronium
in a lab.

 John K Clark

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