Astronomers Strike Gravitational Gold In Colliding Neutron Stars (npr.org)

For the first time, scientists have caught two neutron stars in the act of colliding, revealing that these strange smash-ups are the source of heavy elements such as gold and platinum. From a report: The discovery, announced today at a news conference and in scientific reports written by some 3,500 researchers, solves a long-standing mystery about the origin of these heavy elements -- which are found in everything from wedding rings to cellphones to nuclear weapons. It's also a dramatic demonstration of how astrophysics is being transformed by humanity's newfound ability to detect gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time that are created when massive objects spin around each other and finally collide. "It's so beautiful. It's so beautiful it makes me want to cry. It's the fulfillment of dozens, hundreds, thousands of people's efforts, but it's also the fulfillment of an idea suddenly becoming real," says Peter Saulson of Syracuse University, who has spent more than three decades working on the detection of gravitational waves. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these ripples more than a century ago, but scientists didn't manage to detect them until 2015. Until now, they'd made only four such detections, and each time the distortions in space-time were caused by the collision of two black holes. That bizarre phenomenon, however, can't normally be seen by telescopes that look for light. Neutron stars, by contrast, spew out visible cosmic fireworks when they come together. These incredibly dense stars are as small as cities like New York and yet have more mass than our sun. Further reading: 'A New Rosetta Stone for Astronomy' (The Atlantic), and Gravitational Wave Astronomers Hit Mother Lode (Scientific American).

Comments

It's like Louis Pasteur said:

[hey!]

"Chance favors the prepared mind."

This is an example of that at it's purest, the culmination of years of effort by hundreds of people, all for a moment that might not have happened in their lifetimes.

Re:Created a black hole?

[Anonymous Coward]

This came up in the press conference, and at present they can't say either way. The merger product could be among the most massive neutron stars or lightest black holes.

ether, if it exists, is completely unobservable

[Geoffrey.landis]

You're right that if Einstein hadn't come up with it, special relativity could have been derived from the mathematical insights provided by Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré, but they hadn't yet quite put it all together into the single elegant package Einstein did.

You're off target about pretty much everything else, though. The Michelson-Morley experiment was only the first of many, many experiments that validate special relativity-- with today's measurement technologies that can measure the speed of light directly, there is no need to go to all the trouble Michelson and Morley did to do interferometry. There isn't any way to incorporate ether into today's extensive array of experimental results other than "luminiferous ether, if it exists, is completely unobservable."

Most optical gyroscopes use fibers these days, and don't deal with the speed of light in vacuum at all, although you can do it with ring laser gyroscopes... which obey special relativity.