Man who set himself on fire outside Trump trial dies of injuries, police say
A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former U.S. President Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said.
Nearly a billion years ago, two of the most extreme objects in the universe came together in a death spiral, and one of them didn't make it out alive.
For the first time ever, astronomers have detected two separate instances of black holes swallowing dense neutron stars -- and it played out like Pac-Man in space.
The gravitational waves caused by these two events reached Earth in January 2020, allowing astronomers to retrace the ripples in space-time back to when they occurred in distant galaxies 900 million light-years and a billion light-years away.
The study, involving more than a thousand scientists in these detections, published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The findings could help scientists unlock secrets of the universe and the diverse origins of gravitational waves.
Gravitational waves are created when massive objects in space move and collide, like a pair of black holes or a pair of neutron stars. While scientists believed that such collisions were possible between black holes and neutron stars, they didn't have the evidence of such an event -- until now.
Black holes and neutron stars are both the result of star death. When stars die, they can collapse into ravenous black holes that consume all of the matter around them. Or they can form a neutron star, an incredibly dense remnant that remains after a star explodes.
The two collision events occurred just 10 days apart, with one detected on January 5, 2020 and the second on January 15. They were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US and the Virgo gravitational-wave observatory in Italy.
In the January 5 event, dubbed GW200105, a black hole about nine times the mass of our sun swallowed a neutron star that was 1.9 times the mass of our sun. During the January 15 collision referred to as GW200115, a six-solar-mass black hole gobbled up a 1.5-solar-mass neutron star. A solar mass is the mass of our sun.
"These collisions have shaken the Universe to its core and we've detected the ripples they have sent hurtling through the cosmos," said Susan Scott, study coauthor and distinguished professor at the Australian National University's Research School of Physics in the Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics, in a statement.
"Each collision isn't just the coming together of two massive and dense objects. It's really like Pac-Man, with a black hole swallowing its companion neutron star whole. These are remarkable events and we have waited a very long time to witness them. So it's incredible to finally capture them."
Evidence of this rare event happening not once, but twice, is like the final piece of the puzzle of astronomers trying to investigate if such collisions between two massive, extreme objects occur.
"With this new discovery of neutron star-black hole mergers outside our galaxy, we have found the missing type of binary. We can finally begin to understand how many of these systems exist, how often they merge, and why we have not yet seen examples in the Milky Way," said Astrid Lamberts, study coauthor and a Centre national de la recherche scientifique researcher at Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, in Nice, France, in a statement.
No light was detected from either event, but this didn't surprise the researchers given the great distance and the fact that the black holes were massive enough to completely swallow the neutron stars.
"These were not events where the black holes munched on the neutron stars like the cookie monster and flung bits and pieces about. That 'flinging about' is what would produce light, and we don't think that happened in these cases," said Patrick Brady, spokesperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in a statement.
Previously, astronomers using the gravitational wave detectors have found candidates for possible neutron star-black hole collisions, both of which occurred in 2019, but they did not have enough evidence to confirm them.
Based on the findings from these latest detections, the researchers believe that one of these violent mergers occurs about once a month within a billion light-years of Earth.
The detectors will be switched on for their fourth observation campaign in the summer of 2022 and will be used to search for more of these rare mergers so they can understand where and how often they occur.
"We've now seen the first examples of black holes merging with neutron stars, so we know that they're out there," said Maya Fishbach, a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow and LIGO Scientific Collaboration member.
"But there's still so much we don't know about neutron stars and black holes — how small or big they can get, how fast they can spin, how they pair off into merger partners. With future gravitational wave data, we will have the statistics to answer these questions, and ultimately learn how the most extreme objects in our universe are made."
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.
A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former U.S. President Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said.
An Israeli airstrike on a house in Gaza's southernmost city killed at least nine people, six of them children, hospital authorities said Saturday, as Israel pursued its nearly seven-month offensive in the besieged Palestinian territory.
One day after a Montreal police officer fired gunshots at a suspect in a stolen vehicle, senior officers were telling parliamentarians that organized crime groups are recruiting people as young as 15 in the city to steal cars so that they can be shipped overseas.
Soulful gospel artist Mandisa, a Grammy-winning singer who got her start as a contestant on 'American Idol' in 2006, has died, according to a statement on her verified social media. She was 47.
The House is preparing in a rare Saturday session to approve US$95 billion in foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel and other U.S. allies.
A rescue operation for an orca calf trapped in a remote tidal lagoon off Vancouver Island has been put on hold after it started eating seal meat thrown in the water for what is believed to be the first time.
Michael Gordon Jackson, a Saskatchewan man accused of abducting his daughter to prevent her from getting a COVID-19 vaccine, has been found guilty for contravention of a custody order.
Scottish comedian Samantha Hannah was working on a comedy show about finding a husband when Toby Hunter came into her life. What happened next surprised them both.
In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a B.C. judge has awarded a former couple joint custody of their dog.
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.
Kevin the cat has been reunited with his family after enduring a harrowing three-day ordeal while lost at Toronto Pearson International Airport earlier this week.
Molly Knight, a grade four student in Nova Scotia, noticed her school library did not have many books on female athletes, so she started her own book drive in hopes of changing that.
Almost 7,000 bars of pure gold were stolen from Pearson International Airport exactly one year ago during an elaborate heist, but so far only a tiny fraction of that stolen loot has been found.
When Les Robertson was walking home from the gym in North Vancouver's Lower Lonsdale neighbourhood three weeks ago, he did a double take. Standing near a burrow it had dug in a vacant lot near East 1st Street and St. Georges Avenue was a yellow-bellied marmot.
A moulting seal who was relocated after drawing daily crowds of onlookers in Greater Victoria has made a surprise return, after what officials described as an 'astonishing' six-day journey.
Just steps from Parliament Hill is a barber shop that for the last 100 years has catered to everyone from prime ministers to tourists.
A high score on a Foo Fighters pinball machine has Edmonton player Dave Formenti on a high.
A compound used to treat sour gas that's been linked to fertility issues in cattle has been found throughout groundwater in the Prairies, according to a new study.