The New Big Discovery – Gravitational Waves – Neutron Star Collisions

I wrote my first passion blog on gravitational waves and how we had detected them for the first time a year ago, and that the Nobel prize in physics had been awarded to the researchers who had made this discovery. The main criticism of this blog post is that I didn’t go into detail on what the implications for this groundbreaking discovery were.

It just so happened that this past Monday a new breakthrough was announced from NASA and the LIGO team who detect gravitational waves. They had detected something new- two neutron stars colliding. I discussed last time about how gravitational waves are detected by LIGO so I won’t do that here, but it is important to note that what was detected by LIGO was the ripples in spacetime.

First I want to talk about why these gravitational wave discoveries are important. Einstein theorized about gravitational waves many years ago, and the detection of them confirms many of his theories which had not yet been proven yet. This means that scientists can treat them like fact and build of those theories with absolute certainty that base way of thinking is correct. The discovery of gravitational waves also brings to the forefront a new type of astronomy. Many things in the universe are difficult for astronomers to observe, a simple example is black holes because their gravitational strength is so great that light cannot escape its event horizon. So the LIGO detectors give astronomers a new way to observe these phenomena without using regular telescopes. Finally, the LIGO detectors can be used as mean to confirm other discoveries and observations.

This is exactly the case in what was announced on Monday. LIGO had detected two neutron stars colliding, and then the Hubble Space Telescope was able to confirm by looking in the direction of the event and detecting the massive wave emission that was caused by the neutron star merger. What is a neutron star you may ask? A neutron star is a collapsed star of a star that was once 10-30 solar masses. However, it is so dense that that mass is compacted in a sphere the size of a city on earth. Just think of that- 20 suns inside a sphere the size of Philadelphia- it has a large gravity, which is why the gravitational waves were detected during the merger. These mergers between neutron stars are important to us because most heavy elements in the universe come from the energy release when neutron stars merge. So you can think of the merger that LIGO and Hubble observed as an explosion of gold and platinum and other heavy metals. Your phone has gold in it, and that gold was probably created from a neutron star collision or some other stellar event billions of years ago.