Tau.Neutrino said:
NASA sheds light on strange object created in cosmic collision
In August 2017, astronomers were treated to one of the most spectacular stellar light shows ever seen – a collision between two neutron stars. The smashup was so powerful it sent gravitational ripples through the very fabric of spacetime, and produced flares in visible light, radio waves, x-rays and a gamma ray burst. Now that things have quietened down, astronomers have studied the strange object created in the cosmic collision.
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> About 70 observatories around the world quickly trained their sights on the location, and weren’t disappointed. Across the various instruments, signals were detected in visible light, radio waves, x-rays and a short gamma ray burst. To make things even weirder, the afterglow actually seemed to get brighter over the next few months. Chandra detected no x-ray signals coming from the object two or three days after the explosion, but Chandra made more observations about 110 days after the collision, when it detected brighter signals, and 50 days after that the x-rays became more intense.
> The big question is, what kind of object was created in the collision? The two leading theories were that the neutron stars would merge to form either a black hole or a denser neutron star. Whatever it is, it has a mass of about 2.7 times that of the Sun, according to LIGO data. The object isn’t a dense neutron star, but more likely a black hole.
> That mass just raises further questions. If it’s a neutron star, it’s the most massive one ever detected, but if it’s a black hole, it has almost half the mass of the previous smallest known black hole.
> If it’s a black hole, the signal should gradually fade away as the shock wave weakens. However, if the source gets brighter at x-ray and radio wavelengths over the next few years, it could turn out to be a neutron star after all.
I don’t follow that at all. The source is so far away, in a galaxy far far away, there’s no way we could detect a neutron star at that distance. We have enough trouble spotting neutron stars within our own galaxy.