That ended up in the mouth of black holes were two neutron stars, celestial bodies from the very high density: the unprecedented event.
These are the most mysterious objects in the universe: those black holes that even Albert Einstein could not decipher (although it is his theorization of wormholes). Galactic bodies on which the imagination of writers, directors and video game developers has been exercised, who have imagined them as doors to space-time and caskets of who knows what terrible or wonderful secrets. With their feet on the ground (and their gaze stretching over millions of light years), however, astronomers have scrupulously followed the scientific method. Recently, a Japanese study analyzed a storm of black holes that could perhaps tell us something about the origin of the galaxy. Now scientists have managed to capture the signals of another space event of apocalyptic dimensions and that, like the previous one, could update the knowledge available to us of the laws of the universe.
What are neutron stars and what have observed scientists
It has been compared to a space Pac-Man: black holes that eat stars, stars that disappear in the black mouth of black holes. To be precise, they are neutron stars or compact stars formed by degenerate matter, whose predominant component is neutrons kept together by the force of gravity. They represent the last stage of the life of celestial stars with a density such as to equate in weight a mountain with only one "spoon" of their mass.
How was discovered the cosmic event
It is not a phenomenon that we have had the fortune (or misfortune) to observe directly. At these latitudes, in fact, it arrived in the form of gravitational waves, picked up by a signal of the European receiver Virgo, in which the National Institute of Nuclear Physics participates as Italy. Only now within range of our detectors, the two signals actually originated from an event that happened 900 million years ago.
"Ligo (the American detector, ed.) and Virgo continue to reveal catastrophic events never observed before, helping to shed light on a cosmic landscape so far unexplored. Now we are updating the detectors with the aim of looking even further into the cosmos". So Giovanni Losurdo, researcher at Infn and international coordinator of Virgo, comments on the discovery.
Giuseppe Giordano