Did LIGO just see its most important gravitational wave ever?

[John Clark]

Last Thursday on February 6 LIGO detected a gravitational wave that originated 1.1 billion light years from the Earth and was caused by either a neutron star neutron star merger or a black hole and neutron star merger; the resulting object was less than five solar masses and possibly less than three. That alone would be interesting because it would be the smallest mass that has ever produced a detectable gravitational wave, but there's more. Less than five minutes after the gravitational wave the IceCube detector in Antarctica saw a burst of neutrinos, and the Chime radio telescope in Canada detected a fast radio burst, neither of those two things had ever been associated with the gravitational wave before. The scientific name for the event is S250206dm.

 

Did LIGO just see its most important gravitational wave ever?

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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