The way the LIGOs capture gravity waves operates a bit like a microphone catching sound waves and electronically sending them to a loudspeaker. That’s when the two coordinated LIGOs at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Benton County and its sister site in Louisiana captured gravitational waves from two colliding black holes 1.3 million light years away. 14, 2015, no one on Earth had detected anything physical from a black hole: Despite their omnipresence in pop culture and science fiction, black holes had existed solely as a theory supported by advanced mathematics. Hanford’s connection to groundbreaking black hole science is well-established. “The rate of collisions is awesome,” said Jeffrey Kissel, a control systems engineer at the Hanford observatory. Both neutron stars and black holes are remnants of collapsed stars that behave similarly, but black holes tend to be even more dense. A neutron star is the remnant of a giant star that has become a supernova, leaving a dense husk only a few miles in diameter, but 1.1 to 2.1 times denser than our sun.
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This year, it so far has observed 26 probable black holes colliding with each other or neutron stars ramming into their twins. A black hole is all mouth.”įor almost six months, the Hanford gravitational-wave observatory has been in overdrive locating black holes and neutron stars. Kawabe notes one key difference: “Pac-Man has a mouth pointed in one direction. The effect of a black hole sucking up a dense star or tiny black hole is a bit like watching Pac-Man devour pellets or ghosts. 14 signal was much stronger, allowing scientists to be much more confident that they actually observed a black hole swallowing a neutron star, or another tiny black hole. In late April, the LIGO picked up a faint signal that could have been a black hole swallowing a neutron star, but the signal was too fuzzy to invoke any confidence in the potential discovery. This type of physical evidence for black-hole behavior had never been detected before, shoring up the data supporting Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a keystone of astrophysics.
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They either watched a black hole 900 million miles away swallow a neutron star or observed one black hole gobbling up “the tiniest black hole ever found,” according to Keita Kawabe, detection lead scientist at the observatory at Hanford.Įither way, the Hanford-linked project’s shared discovery was groundbreaking. That’s because for the first time scientists at three observatories - Hanford, its sister LIGO facility in Louisiana and a European LIGO facility in Italy - simultaneously discovered gravitational ripples from a type of cosmic collision never seen before. ”There was more energy, more curiosity than usual among the scientists,” he said.