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Black Hole Birth Detected this Morning
An anonymous reader writes "SPACE.com is reporting on the first optical afterglow ever detected from a short-duration (milliseconds) Gamma-Ray Burst. The GRB signals the birth of a black hole resulting from a merger between two neutron stars. Theory had predicted the whole thing, which was all spotted this morning by NASA's Swift satellite and ground-based observatories, thanks to an automated email system that notifies astronomers worldwide."
Wasn't there another slashdot article a few weeks ago about how blackholes don't exist? I think it was talking about this report.
Found it. Donald Coyne of UCSC gave a talk on the Ultimate Fate of Small Black Holes. Be sure to check the Milagro link on his facutly page.
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From what I've read, you have a better chance of detecting a black hole by looking for the effects of its gravitational field on light that passes nearby. It should warp the apparent positions of stars.
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You're probably joking, but you got modded informative so:
From your link "according to a physicist"... There is a general consensus that black holes with singularities exist, but the universe doesn't give a damn about our consensual opinion - the Earth would be flat otherwise.
This is how science works, people come up with testable ideas which are proven right or wrong. No-one is arguing that super-dense, intrinsically dark objects don't exist, we have plenty of evidence that they do. Infinitely dense singularities, well, maybe not - if they exist as we predict they're inside an event horizon and therefore unobservable so actually directly verifying their existance is always going to be impossible... all we can do is come up with odd ideas like dark energy stars which might bounce matter out and see if we can observe that happening.
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Black holes are detectable. The accretion disk about the even horizon emits a lot of gamma rays, because matter falling into the hole are accelerated like crazy. Once matter has reach the even horizon of course, nothing escapes.
Think of it as a last cry of atoms being swallowed.
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There are long and short GRB events. This was the first time an optical afterglow was detected for a short event. The theory was that long and short GRBs were caused by similar events, and we should see an afterglow for both - which, of course, is the evidence that was found.
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Real image: (Note it is a negative - black means lots of light. The big thing in the middle is a galaxy, and the error box is pointing to somewhere on its outer edge.)0 9.jpg
http://www.srl.caltech.edu/~cenko/grb050509b/0505
What they detected was a gamma ray burst and an afterglow. Everything else is speculation; they are basically saying "if all our theories are correct, then the explanation that this is two neutron stars merging into a black hole is the most plausible explanation". The observation does not provide any additional evidence that black holes exist.
From an event such as this 2.2 billion light years away, the gravity waves would be negligibly small. The LIGO detector will not be sensitive enough to detect merging neutron stars farther away than the local galaxy cluster (10 million light years in diameter).