Strange Stars Caught Wrinkling Spacetime? Get the Facts.
If confirmed, a rumored merger between two neutron stars may also point toward the origin of the galaxy’s gold.
SUN VALLEY, IDAHOExcited conversations have been happening in the halls of an astronomy meeting this week, as scientists await reports about a potential collision of exotic dead stars. If the chatter is true, scientists have detected the first ripples in spacetime produced by a cataclysmic merger of two neutron stars.
These ripples, known as gravitational waves, were directly detected for the first time in 2015 by the LIGO Science Collaboration. That event, along with two more confirmed detections, occurred when two black holes collided.
Now, it’s possible astronomers have detected gravitational waves generated as two stellar corpses whipped around one another and eventually merged. And it seems the merger may have left a lingering cosmic fingerprint that teams are racing to
