![]() The detectors use lasers to measure the tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time created by the collision of massive objects elsewhere in the universe. If it’s a black hole, it’s an exciting black hole.”Īstronomers discovered the confounding object on August 14, 2019, using gravitational wave detectors in Italy and the United States called the International LIGO-Virgo Collaboration, reports Pallab Ghosh for BBC News. ![]() If it’s a neutron star, it’s an exciting neutron star. “We don’t know if this object is the heaviest known neutron star or the lightest known black hole, but either way it breaks a record. “We’ve been waiting decades to solve this mystery,” Vicky Kalogera, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University and one the authors of a new paper describing the discovery, tells the Times. A more massive core turns the core into a light eating black hole and a less massive core will condense into a neutron star-meaning somewhere in the mass gap there may be a tipping point, a mass beyond which a black hole is preordained and below which a neutron star forms. The deaths of such stars entail brilliant supernovae that are punctuated in a transformation of the star’s remaining hyper-dense core into either a neutron star or a black hole, wrote Jason Daley for Smithsonian in 2019. Part of the significance of this mass gap is that neutron stars and black holes each represent possible outcomes for dying high-mass stars. Black holes on the other hand don’t seem to come smaller than five solar masses. ![]() Collapsed stars, called neutron stars, have topped out at 2.14 times the mass of the sun and their generally accepted theoretical upper limit is 2.5 solar masses, according to the Times. This places the misfit, still 2.6 times the mass of the sun, squarely in what’s called the “mass gap,” reports Rafi Letzter for Live Science. The strange object defies categorization, being more massive than any known collapsed star and less massive than any black hole ever detected, reports Dennis Overbye for the New York Times. Roughly 780 million years ago and a correspondingly distant 780 million light-years away, a strange stellar object was devoured by a black hole 23 times more massive than the sun.
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