If the (now pretty loud) whispering I’ve been hearing over the past six weeks is any indication, we’re about to find out. The ESO (European Southern Observatory) has a press conference scheduled for next Monday regarding an “unprecedented discovery” of a never-before-observed astronomical phenomenon. Maybe a bit hyperbolic but cool stuff nonetheless.
What makes this particularly interesting is that it likely involves not just a gravitational wave detection by LIGO (and also Virgo, LIGO’s new European counterpart!) but also an accompanying photon detection by multiple telescopes. Hubble for one is known to have interrupted its schedule for an observation in the same region where just shortly beforehand LIGO and Virgo reportedly pinpointed a gravitational wave event. (With Virgo now online we can triangulate GW locations with really good accuracy.)
The other cool part of course is that LIGO, beefed up since its initial GW detections, can now “see” merging neutron stars. This merger all but surely involves the remnants of a binary star pair, both of which went supernova some time ago. Interesting data about neutron stars oughta come out of this. For one thing: confirmation that they actually exist.
https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann17071/Some background info in this 1998 paper :
https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9807272“…the (neutron star) mergers are likely to be accompanied with prominent optical transients…”
-Dave-