![]() “One of the most exciting moments of our research is when our phones ring heralding the newest alerts of mergers that have been detected mere seconds ago,” said Surabhi Sachdev, an Eberly Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Penn State and a LIGO team member. This merger was detected in near real time by the low-latency GstLAL matched-filtering search pipeline, which is developed and operated largely by the gravitational-wave research group at Penn State. "We don't know if this object is the heaviest known neutron star, or the lightest known black hole, but either way it breaks a record." "We've been waiting decades to solve this mystery," said Vicky Kalogera, a professor at Northwestern University. A paper about the detection is available in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 14, 2019, as it merged with a black hole of 23 solar masses, generating a splash of gravitational waves detected back on Earth by LIGO and Virgo. Now, in a new study from the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European Virgo detector, scientists have announced the discovery of an object of 2.6 solar masses, placing it firmly in the mass gap. The question remained: Does anything lie in this so-called mass gap? ![]() For decades, astronomers have been puzzled by a gap in mass that lies between neutron stars and black holes: the heaviest known neutron star is no more than 2.5 times the mass of our sun, or 2.5 solar masses, and the lightest known black hole is about 5 solar masses. ![]() When the most massive stars die, they collapse under their own gravity and leave behind black holes when stars that are a bit less massive than this die, they explode and leave behind dense, dead remnants of stars called neutron stars. ![]()
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