A black hole consumes neutron stars: a new set of theories proposes after two collisions.

A black hole consumes neutron stars! Stars are massive objects that have a powerful gravity force. It doesn’t even allow light to escape. On the other hand, neutron stars are very dense dead stars. To imagine it, a tablespoon of neutron stars weighs around 4 billion tons.

A black hole consumes neutron stars. That’s no surprise that researchers predicted the collisions. However, they were not aware of how often they would occur.

This discovery means that scientists may require revisiting the ideas on how stars and galaxies form. Prof Vivien Raymond, from Cardiff University, said, on BBC News, that they had to go back and rewrite their theories.

In regards to the collisions, the first one detected on January 5, 2020. This happened between a black hole with a mass of six and a half times one of our suns. It crashed into a neutron star one and a half times bigger than our central star.

For the first time, researchers have detected a neutron star crashing into a black hole.

The second collision happened 10 days later. A black hole, this time ten times bigger than our sun collided into a neutron star-sized like two of our parent stars.

Researchers were able to detect this because when black holes consume neutron stars and objects so big crash into each other, they create ripples in the fabric of space. These are called gravitational waves. The trace of ripples they leave is the ones that scientists detect.

They measured the waves that cause because the sudden changes in gravitational forces. These travelled for hundreds of millions of light-years through space, and detectors part of the Advanced Light Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (ALIGO) picked them up. They are in Washington and Louisiana in the US and central Italy.

The fact that a black hole consumes neutron stars also leads scientists to theorize that black holes and neutron stars are found alongside each other. This also suggests that stars produce fewer heavy objects and also pushes them with less force than previously thought.

Prof Sheila Rowan of Glasgow University states that through the collisions’ type and frequency, they have created a more detailed idea of the dynamics inside galaxies over the past six years.

Prof Raymond also said that we have to keep our minds open and see what the Universe is telling us.

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