Astronomers unravel a blast that sent ripples in space-time

https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/astronomers-unravel-blast-sent-ripples-space-time

by kartikkumar • 7 years ago

43 25 7 years ago

delta.tudelft.nl

Tehchops2• 7 years ago

"During such events, massive amounts of heavy metals are formed. This collision, for instance, produced a lump of gold with the mass of our planet in just a split second."

We need to find a localized wormhole and go mine that.

jajag• 7 years ago

Yeah and watch inflation sky-rocket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution

caprese• 7 years ago

yeah but you still get to sell it even as your yields decrease

death spirals are still profitable for the issuer

sarcasmOrTears• 7 years ago

Lowering price of materials allow the creation of new and more goods, so it's always a good thing

rev_null• 7 years ago

How is gold created out of the collision of stars composed of neutrons?

adrianN2• 7 years ago

If you smash proton and neutron clumps the size of stars together you get fragments that are gold-sized.

Tehchops2• 7 years ago

How is gold created out of the collision of stars composed of neutrons?

They are composed predominantly out of neutrons. Some percentage of their composition is still electrons and assorted atomic nuclei, which is a non-trivial amount of matter considering the common range of density they tend to have.

I would imagine all kinds of interesting(strange?) interactions take place when such dense and energetic objects collide.

dredmorbius• 7 years ago

Neutronium (degenerate neutron fluid) is only stable at immense pressure.

Relieve that pressure -- by flinging bits into space in a collision or explosion -- and it reverts to neutrons + protons + electrons + antineutrinos, forming first ultramassive nuclei, which rapidly decay to stable elements, many being heavy elements well above iron in atomic number.

The nuclei mar be formed by r-capture (rapid capture), or perhaps devolve from dense neutronium clumps.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04807

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutronium

A_No_Name_Mouse• 7 years ago

"The vision of VLBI is so sharp that if people were playing table tennis on the Moon we would see the moves of the ping pong ball. "

I was under the impression that a radio telescope could only take a single pixel image. Are they using a different kind of receiver that can create a complete image? If so, how can they still increase resolution using interference?

coder5506• 7 years ago

It's a raster scan. Larger images are built one pixel at a time.

fspeech• 7 years ago

I think he was talking about angular resolution. EM wave arrives at different antennas at slightly different time. The phase difference allows for very high resolution of the direction the wave is coming from. [VLBI](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interfero...) effectively produces an antenna with an aperture the size of the Earth. To make it work one needs extremely accurate time synchronization and spatial location. In the interview he talked about continental drift of several millimeters per year. Those are the things they need to compensate for.

goodcanadian• 7 years ago

A sibling comment mentions raster scanning: building up an image one pixel at a time. That is largely true for a single telescope (though it is possible to have an array of receivers taking multiple pixels at the same time).

However, VLBI is an array of telescopes. Using interferometry - measuring the interference pattern of the signals of each pair of telescopes - we get simultaneous data on a variety of angular scales and orientations. As the Earth turns, the sky appears to turn, and more points in the UV plane can be measured. Once you have enough data, you can essentially get an image by doing a Fourier transform of the data.

hi41• 7 years ago

Kudos to the scientists, astronomers and engineers who made this possible. This is so amazing. The reference to being able to see Ping balls on moon is unbelievable. We have such brilliant people in our midst!

maxnoe2• 7 years ago

To add another moon reference, a cell phone on the moon would be the third brightest radio source in the sky.

maxnoe2• 7 years ago

To add another moon reference: A normal cell phone on the moon would be the third brightest radio source in the sky.

osheamonn• 7 years ago

"In 2015 gravitational waves were detected that resulted from a collision of supermassive black holes."

"The 2015 discovery was an event of another physical nature, much more powerful than the 2017 one, as it included the collision of supermassive black holes, each of the order of 100 millions of solar masses"

This is not true. GW150914 was from the collision of two black holes of ~30 solar masses each.

Astronomers unravel a blast that sent ripples in space-time

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