![if the sun turned into a black hole if the sun turned into a black hole](https://www.sciencealert.com/images/articles/processed/92384729387-black-hole_1024.jpg)
Frequently Asked Questions About Black Holes.“We expect that exploding star supernova are emitting gravitational waves, but we have not detected them yet. “We expect that rotating neutron stars are emitting periodic gravitational waves, but we haven’t detected them yet,” Dr. Giovanni Losurdo, a research director at the Institute for Nuclear Physics in Italy and the spokesman for VIRGO, said in the upcoming years astronomers may be detecting gravitational wave events including much fainter ones at a stunning pace averaging one a day. A third gravitational wave detector in Japan is coming online, and another LIGO instrument is being planned in India. The next round of observations by LIGO and VIRGO are scheduled to begin no earlier than June next year. VIRGO is undergoing upgrades that will increase its sensitivity. “That’s really now kind of the open question,” he said. It is possible that the search techniques were not quite right, or perhaps the pairs merge quickly and there are no more left in our galaxy. Brady said one of the remaining questions was why no black hole-neutron pairs have been found within the Milky Way. “Will the amazing cosmic laboratory add something about the inner workings of a neutron star?”ĭr. Marka, a scientist at the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory at Columbia University who works on LIGO. “We really hope this will happen in the future,” said Zsuzsanna A. Astronomers remain unsure whether it was a neutron star or a black hole.īut as more such collisions are observed, patterns will emerge and the chances of discerning more details increase. That is larger than any neutron star that has ever been detected - and smaller than any black hole that has ever been detected. The smaller one had a mass of 2.6 times that of the sun. The larger object in the collision was definitely a black hole. “So it sort of sits there as one of these things that might be, but right now we don’t have sufficient evidence to say it was.” “We think it’s unlikely that that was really an astrophysical signal,” Dr. It might have been what they were hoping it was - the rumblings of a black hole-neutron wave collision - or it might have just been random and meaningless jiggles in imperfect data. But one of them, in April 2019, did not hold up under scrutiny. In 2019, two gravitational wave detections appeared to have finally bagged this elusive astronomical quarry. “Why have we not seen a neutron star-black hole system?” “So in effect, we’ve had this mystery question,” Dr.
IF THE SUN TURNED INTO A BLACK HOLE SERIES
With the help of VIRGO, a similar but smaller European gravitational wave observatory located in Italy, astronomers were able to pinpoint the part of the sky where the explosion occurred, and a series of telescopes were then able to detect particles of light, from radio waves to X-rays, emanating from that fireball.Īstronomers had long expected to find a neutron star orbiting a black hole, but in nearly half a century of searches of our Milky Way galaxy, they never found one. Such collisions create most of the gold and silver in the universe. Two years later, LIGO detected the collision of two neutron stars - the burnt-out remnants of stars more massive than the sun but not large enough to collapse into black holes.