It has only been a couple of years since the first historic detection of gravitational waves, but now physicists are already dissecting a handful of signals that emanated hundreds of millions of light-years away to elucidate how some of the most violent events in our universe work.
Most of the gravitational wave signals detected so far involve the merger of black holes, but one signal, detected on Aug. 17, 2017, was special—it was caused by the smashup of two neutron stars. This merger also generated a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) that was detected at nearly the same time, linking GRBs with neutron star mergers and highlighting where heavy elements in our universe are forged. A new era of “multimessenger astronomy” had begun.
Now, the signal (designated GW170817) has been reanalyzed to understand what happened after the merger. Analysis that came before suggested that the collision of the two neutron stars would have tipped the mass balance to create a black hole. According to a new study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, two physicists suggest a contradictory scenario: GW170817 didn’t create a black hole, it produced a hypermassive neutron star, instead.
“We’re still very much in the pioneering era of gravitational wave astronomy. So it pays to look at data in detail,” said Maurice van Putten of Sejong University in South Korea. “For us this really paid off, and we’ve been able to confirm that two neutron stars merged to form a larger one.”
The secret behind this finding focuses on the datasets recorded by the US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and Italian Virgo observatory. When gravitational waves are recorded during a black hole or neutron star merger event, their frequency rapidly increases (as the objects orbit one another faster and faster as they get closer and closer) and then abruptly cuts off (when they collide). When turned into an audio file, mergers sound like “chirps.” Apart from sounding like an eerie bird call coming from deep space, physicists have been able to extract surprisingly detailed information from the conditions of the merging objects, such as their mass and rates of spin.
And this is where van Putten’s work comes in.
Working with Massimo della Valle of the Osservatorio Astronomico de Capodimonte in Italy, the duo applied a new analysis technique to these data and detected a 5-second descending “chirp” (as shown by the downward arrow in the graph above). This descending chirp happened immediately after the GRB was detected coming from the same location as the gravitational wave signal’s origin. According to their analysis, the spin-down—from 1 KHz to 49 Hz—was most likely representative of a very massive neutron star and not a black hole.
If corroborated, this discovery could have profound implications for astrophysics. How hypermassive neutron stars (like the one that was created by GW170817) can exist without collapsing into a black hole will likely keep theorists busy for some time and physicists will be hopeful for another gravitational wave event like GW170817.
astroengine.com 