Astronomers have made an exciting discovery: they saw how a black hole collided with a thing that actually cannot exist.
Both the gravitational wave detector Ligo in the United States and the Virgo in Italy observed on August 14 the collision of a black hole with an unknown, smaller something due to the afterglow of space and time, as described in trade magazine The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Scientists are speculating about what it could be. The thing should be at least 2.5 times heavier than the sun. This makes it officially too heavy to be a neutron star, but also too light for a black hole.
“Nevertheless, it will eventually be one of those two,” says astronomer and co-author Samaya Nissanke (University of Amsterdam) soberly. It would mean that neutron stars are constructed differently than expected or that it is a special black hole. A black hole is created by the death of a heavy star and then becomes at least five sun masses.
It could possibly be two neutron stars that merge into a black hole. However, there are also other options. In professional literature, for example, stars are made of mysterious, dark matter and transparent boson stars, which are invisible to us.
Read more about it at de Volkskrant.
Bron(nen): De Volkskrant –
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