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In April, hints of a new particle in the Standard Model originated from LHCb, a small companion detector to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator. Physicists working with LHCb noticed a deviation in the decay rates and patterns of B mesons—particles that last only about a thousandth of a nanosecond. Aberrations in B meson decays suggest there might be a lost particle waiting to be found.
Then in October, physicists from LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and Virgo, a new gravitational wave observatory in Italy, announced that they’d detected an electromagnetic signature of a neutron star collision that occurred 130 million years ago. It seems like this would be an insignificant milestone in the timeline of our universe—but to researchers, it’s like a letter from the past, delivered in the form of light.
This artist’s illustration shows two tiny
but very dense neutron stars at the point at which they merge and burst
into a kilonova.
The merger of these neutron stars created pandemonium both out in
space and here on Earth. The crash caused a bright explosion called a
kilonova, sending light speeding toward our planet. Just two seconds
before the light arrived at Earth, the gravitational waves that had
emanated from the event also passed through our planet.Excitement ensued in the physics community and amongst members of the general public—this example of “multi-messenger astrophysics” shows that physicists are now capable of analyzing gravitational wave data in conjunction with other types of information (in this case, light) to provide a mosaic of perspectives on a single cosmological event.
Now it’s clear that the 2015 gravitational wave discovery—groundbreaking at the time—was just the beginning of a “renaissance in astronomy,” according to astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala, who is part of LIGO’s detection committee. Watch our video on the finding:
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