Ripples in space-time suggest that a black hole swallowed a neutron star

Astronomers observing the cosmos looking for light ripples in space-time may have detected a black hole swallowing a neutron star for the very first time. Gravitational wave observatories in the United States and Europe have re-lit after the April updates to hunt for these extreme cosmic events, and since then have detected 23 potential cosmic swayings. The latest is perhaps the most exciting to date – and it is also potentially the most confusing.

The event, designated S190814bv, was detected on August 14 by the LIGO twin-detector fine-tuning lasers in the United States and by the Virgo detector in Italy. The installations perceived ripples in the fabric of the universe and suggested, tentatively, that they resulted from a collision between a black hole and a small, dense star called a "neutron star" .

The facilities have already been impacted by black hole-neutron collisions, but none have been adequately verified. Since their return in April, only three candidates for this insane type of cosmic collision have been presented with more or less confidence. Indeed, the detectors are so well adjusted that they sometimes signal the noise as a real event.

For S190814bv, the probability that the newly detected signal is simply noise is 1 in 10 septillions of years.

This would even dissuade Han Solo from thinking that S190814bv is anything but a black star-hole neutron fusion, but the researchers still recommend caution. It could be, they say, two black holes that merge.

This suggests an exciting possibility that one of the black holes is lighter than any black hole ever seen before. We can not lose!

If the event is confirmed as a fusion of neutron stars and black holes, it would complete the tripta of cosmic detections of LIGO and Virgo. The facilities saw black holes merge with black holes and neutron stars fuse with neutron starsbut they have never seen both fade.

The next step is to focus the telescopes on the small part of the sky from which S190814bv originated. It is relatively close, by cosmic standards, only 900 million light-years away. Gravitational waves propagate faster than other electromagnetic waves, allowing astronomers to attempt to detect other signals emitted by the event. What will we see?

"We will see a neutron star being torn by a black hole or swallowed whole, as if Pac-Man was swallowing a ghost," said Simon Stevenson, astronomer at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. "In any case, let's do a show!"