There is a rumor that LIGO has found another gravitational wave event, but what's new is that this time they've matched it up with something that optical telescopes can see. If true that almost certainly was caused by merging Neutron Stars not merging Black Holes. It all started when astronomer J Craig Wheeler tweeted: "*New LIGO source with optical counterpart. Blow your sox off!*" That may also explain a otherwise enigmatic tweet from another astronomer, Andy Howell, that was sent just last week: “*Tonight is one of those nights where watching the astronomical observations roll in is better than any story any human has ever told*.”
If it happened in the last month or so the new Virgo detector was online so maybe they used it to triangulate and that's how they could pinpoint where the wave came from and tell the optical astronomers where to look. According to the rumor it happened in a large old elliptical galaxy called NGC 4993 about 130 million light years away, and that is just the sort of place you'd expect to find merging Neutron stars, 130 million light years is much closer than the Black Hole mergers , but then it would have to be if LIGO could detect it because Neutron Stars produce weaker Gravitational Waves than Neutron Stars, although they are more common. NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory saw a Short Gamma Ray Burst coming from NGC 4993 on August 19, and on August 22 the Hubble Space Telescope people suddenly changed their observation schedule and decided to point their telescope at NGC 4993, they gave as the reason for this change in planes "follow up on a candidate observation of gravitational waves". The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and the top radio telescope in the world, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array Chile also stopped what they were doing and turned to look at NGC 4993 on August 19. And late yesterday LIGO issued a official statement about all this: *“Some promising gravitational-wave candidates have been identified in data from both LIGO and Virgo during our preliminary analysis, and we have shared what we currently know with astronomical observing partners. We are working hard to assure that the candidates are valid gravitational-wave events, and it will require time to establish the level of confidence needed to bring any results to the scientific community and the greater public. We will let you know as soon we have information ready to share.”* 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.
