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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).

2 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Is anything sadder than the fake tears of a moron? by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: -1, Troll

    Einstein didn't predict shit, he plagiarized his theory from Minkowski, Poincare, and Lorentz. Moreover, gravity waves were predicted by an extension of electrodynamics and Einstein misinterpreted the equations he stole as "spacetime" when the relativistic media is aether with space and time as emergent effects.

  2. Re:Is anything sadder than the fake tears of a mor by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: -1, Troll

    Have you even read the actual (non-heaviside-vector reduction) Maxwell field equations? Have you worked them at all? Are you aware aether theory was never at odds with relativity, because it predicted relativity as we see it today? Are you aware that the Michelson-Morley experiment was only designed to detect a static aether through which matter moved, and Morley later devised an experiment to test for a relativistic aether which showed positive results, the principles of which are in use today in optical gyroscopes, among other devices (but hey, it makes so much more sense to consider those the product of a bunch of separate effects instead of one underlying thing, right? Occam's Razor be damned!)

    Face it, you're speaking out of your ass and have never bothered to research what the "kooks" were talking about, go be euphoric.