Last year, thanks to the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors, astronomers managed to detect a unique cosmic catastrophe - the collision of a neutron star and a black hole. But there is something unusual about him …
Using some of the most sensitive detectors to date, a team of scientists discovered one oddity. According to the new study, they did not detect even a brief flash of light caused by the collision of a black hole and a neutron star. And this despite the fact that an incredibly bright star is literally torn apart by the colossal force of gravity of a black hole!
What does it mean? No one can say for sure. According to physicist Morgan Fraser, this circumstance “can mean anything. The black hole may have swallowed up the star without a trace. The signal may have been too weak. It is also possible that we simply missed it,”the scientist admits.
What is curious is the unusual characteristics of the participants in the collision. One object was three times the mass of the Sun, the second was five times smaller. Both a black hole and a neutron star are born from "dead" luminaries, but astronomers have never seen a black hole so tiny that its mass is five times less than the mass of the Sun - as well as a neutron star, which would exceed the Sun by several once.
Photo of a star being swallowed up by a black hole
There is one more interesting hypothesis. A neutron star may still be in the process of being gradually consumed by a black hole, so its breaking point has simply not arrived. Or maybe we are dealing with a new, not yet familiar to a scientist, type of cosmic phenomena - perhaps, among the huge amounts of data coming from telescopes, sooner or later it will be possible to find the correct information.