With the sighting of a merger between a black hole and a neutron star
, just after 9pm Universal Time, a ripple of gravitational waves reached Earth. Until a few years ago no one would have noticed such an event. But 2015 saw the reopening, after an upgrade, of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory , a pair of detectors in Washington state and Louisiana. These were joined in 2017 by Virgo, an upgraded instrument in Italy.
Gravitational-wave detectors work by splitting a laser beam in twain. The two halves of the beam are then sent down separate arms, several kilometres long, that are oriented at right angles to one another . Each arm has a mirror at the end to reflect its half-beam back whence it came, and the reflected half-beams are then recombined. Normally, this recombination causes peaks in one half-beam’s waves to overlie troughs in the other’s, and vice versa, resulting in darkness.
In the case of S190814bv the crucial mass ratio that might expose the pasta has yet to be determined. The reason astronomers believe they have witnessed a neutron star/black hole merger is the masses of the objects involved. The larger had more than five times the mass of the sun, and physics dictates that something this massive which is generating no starlight to counteract the pull of its gravity must be a black hole. The smaller object, by contrast, was below three solar masses.
Unlike electromagnetic radiation or neutrinos, gravitational waves from a supernova could tell astronomers how the dense matter within a star was swirling around as it exploded. They could also help determine whether an exploding star collapsed symmetrically or not. And, after a supernova explosion has blown off much of the stellar material, what remains often becomes a neutron star or a black hole.
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