JournalandProceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales

摘要

W e live in exciting times. No sooner had this year’s Nobel prize for physics been awarded to the team leaders of the LIGO gravity-wave observatories that had earlier in the year reported the first detections of gravity waves — of two black holes fusing (what do they do? holes colliding?) — than Virgo, a third observatory, helped to triangu- late the source of a new gravity-wave burst: two neutron stars colliding (definitely col- liding) to form a black hole. Whereas not much if any radiation escapes a black-hole encounter, neutron stars colliding produce light, radio waves, X-rays, and gamma rays, which can be independently observed. But not yet neutrinos. This was accomplished with optical observatories and others cor- roborating the event.