![]() ![]() “It’s an awesome milestone for the nascent field of gravitational-wave astronomy,” says Rory Smith, an OzGrav astrophysicist at Monash University. The mystery still hasn’t been solved, which makes these two new detections the first unambiguous evidence of black hole–neutron star collisions. This could have been the first black hole–neutron star detection, but it was uncertain because the second object had an odd, in-between mass that would either make it the lightest black hole or the heaviest neutron star ever discovered. In August 2019, the collaboration announced it had spotted a black hole swallowing a mystery object, around 800 million light years away. “Now we’ve completed the last piece of the puzzle with the first confirmed observations of gravitational waves from a black hole and a neutron star colliding,” says astrophysicist Susan Scott from the Australian National University (ANU) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav). Remarkably, just 10 days later, they detected another. ![]() ![]() Since then, the observatories have seen many more of these events, plus, less frequently, the weaker signals from the mergers of two neutron stars.īut on 5 January 2020, after years of waiting, scientists finally completed the trifecta by spotting the death spiral of a neutron star into a black hole. The detections were made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US and the Virgo gravitational-wave observatory in Italy, which first captured ripples in space-time reverberating out from a cataclysmic collision between two black holes in 2015. Supermassive black hole in Milky Way’s centre, Sagittarius A*, imaged for the first timeįor the first time, scientists have detected gravitational waves from a black hole swallowing a neutron star – and not just once, but twice.Australian researchers discover the fastest-growing black hole of the last 9 billion years.Gravitational waves on the podium: first Australian to win the Blaise Pascal Medal.Compact galactic dust could hold key to supermassive black hole formation.Cyclic carbon circling black holes – as seen by James Webb Space Telescope. ![]()
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