What Happens When Two Neutron Stars Collide? Scientific Revolution

Late last week, as some staff astronomers embarked on trips to see Monday's solar eclipse, two of NASA's space-based observatories--Hubble and Chandra X-ray--and at least two land-based telescopes scrambled to capture a far more explosive event. The astronomers who stayed behind trained their telescopes on a patch of sky where they hoped to find an astrophysical Rosetta stone: a cataclysmic event capable of producing electromagnetic signals on top of gravitational waves separately detected by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Advanced LIGO). Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences. The LIGO collaboration made headlines in February 2016 when it announced it had detected gravitational waves from two colliding black holes. Four months later, while still in its first observing run, the team confirmed the detection of a second black hole merger.