Mysterious Burst Of Gravitational Waves Hit Earth!
316From what it means, to what it could've come from, and the entire mystery of it all! Join me as we explore how a mysterious burst of gravitational waves hit earth!
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I know what you're thinking, "gravitational waves hit Earth...so what?" and on the surface (pun somewhat intended) I can see your indifference. Clearly these gravitational waves didn't affect the Earth in a way that we should worry, and as you'll soon find out the waves themselves were only detected in a split second of time, so why should we care about these at all?
The answer to that is very simple...we have no idea where it came from...at all.
The gravitational wave signal, picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo interferometer, lasted only 14 milliseconds, and astronomers haven't yet been able to pinpoint the burst's cause or determine whether it was just a blip in the detectors. More than likely, it wasn't a blip, because if that was the case then there would be more of them having as space and time go on...but it hasn't.
So, if it wasn't a random thing, then that would mean that it's something more, something greater, and of course, something cosmic. But what could cause gravitational waves to hit the Earth, even if it's just a short period of time, and have us not know what it is? Obviously that rules out something going on in our own solar system, so for the "truth" we must look beyond, look to the galaxies and systems beyond our own and see what it might have been.
With that in mind, what out there in the cosmos might be able to cause such waves to reach Earth? The biggest likely theory is that two massive objects collided with each other out in space. How often does that happen? More than you might think. Never forget, it's a big universe out there, and there are a lot of things running into each other all the time. But, in order to create waves like these, it would have to be something massive, like a Neutron Star or a Black Hole colliding with a counterpart of theirs. Again, this is something that does happen a lot in space. Neutron Stars colliding is actually more common than you realize, but that's another list.
But if that's the answer...why is the gravity waves still a mystery?
That would be because the gravitational waves from collisions of such massive objects typically last longer and manifest in the data as a series of waves that change in frequency over time as the two orbiting objects move closer to each other, said Andy Howell, a staff scientist at Los Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network and an adjunct faculty member in physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
But this didn't read like that at all, so more than likely, this isn't two Neutron Stars or Black Holes colliding. Which has been further backed up by the type of signal that has been detected before by those kinds of events, and this was a "burst" of gravity waves, not a wave of signals like others that have been detected before.
Alright, so what's another theory that could tell us what these mysterious waves could be? The second theory is that these gravity waves could be the remnants of a massive star collapsing and going Supernova. Not unlike Neutron Stars or Black Holes colliding, this happens more than you might think, and going Supernova is a big part of the life of a star.
We do know that there are stars in the sky right now that are potentially on the verge of going Supernova (within tens of thousands of years roughly), so scientists looked to see if any of them were not where they were supposed to be, as well as looking for bright new lights in the sky. One of the biggest candidates for a Supernova boom is the star known as Betelgeuse.
This star is in the later stages of its life, and is already showing the signs of getting "close" to Supernova stage. When the gravitational burst was found, some thought that Betelgeuse had exploded earlier than expected...but it hadn't. The star is still exactly where it was supposed to be, and none of the other candidates appear to have gone Supernova either.
What's more, the burst still "seems a little too short for what we expect from the collapse of a massive star," he said. "On the other hand, we've never seen a star blowing up in gravitational waves before, so we don't really know what it would look like."
Here's another checkmark in the "why it may not be a Supernova" box. When a Supernova goes off, one of the things that it sends out into the universe itself is Neutrinos. Tiny subatomic particles that carry no charge. They LOVE to send those out, and after scientists found out about them, they made detectors (all over the Earth) so that they could go and detect the Neutrinos when they came our way. So much so that WHEN a Supernova does go off, we'll get readings of the Neutrinos about an hour or two before the..
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