For the first time astrophysicists have confirmed two similar cases of cataclysmic fusion of black holes with neutron stars. With the help of gravitational waves created and traveled to Earth, the two incidents were detected by the LIGO (USA) and VIRGO (Europe) gravitational wave observatories, ten days apart from each other. In both cases, the black hole “swallowed” the entire neutron star.
Gravitational waves are “wrinkles” of spacetime, caused by massive objects moving in the universe. In the six years since the first gravitational wave detection on Earth (in 2015), a total of more than 50 cases of fusion of either black holes or pairs of neutron stars have been detected.
Now, for the first time, scientists who published the paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters have detected gravitational waves from a fusion of a black hole and a neutron star. The first fusion involved a black hole about nine times the mass of the Sun and a neutron star with a mass of 1.9 solar masses. The second involved a black hole with almost six solar masses and a neutron star with one and a half solar masses. Neither incident was detected by an optical telescope.
Astronomers have been searching for neutron stars around black holes in our galaxy for decades, but have yet to find them. The two sources of the new gravitational waves, called GW200105 and GW200115, are located in two other galaxies, 900 million to one billion light-years from Earth, but cannot be determined with precision. Scientists estimate that such cataclysms occur with a frequency of about one per month in a radius of one billion light-years from our planet.
The LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA (Japan) gravitational observatories have improved their detectors and are preparing for a new round of observations, starting in the summer of 2022. The European VIRGO detector is located near Pisa, Italy. The participation in these researches of the Greek professor of Astrophysics Vicky Kalogera of Northwestern University is important.
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