{"id":128843,"date":"2021-10-10T23:22:37","date_gmt":"2021-10-11T06:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/astrophysicists-explain-the-origin-of-unusually-heavy-neutron-star-binaries"},"modified":"2021-10-10T23:22:37","modified_gmt":"2021-10-11T06:22:37","slug":"astrophysicists-explain-the-origin-of-unusually-heavy-neutron-star-binaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/astrophysicists-explain-the-origin-of-unusually-heavy-neutron-star-binaries","title":{"rendered":"Astrophysicists explain the origin of unusually heavy neutron star binaries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/astrophysicists-explain-the-origin-of-unusually-heavy-neutron-star-binaries.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A new study showing how the explosion of a stripped massive star in a supernova can lead to the formation of a heavy neutron star or a light black hole resolves one of the most challenging puzzles to emerge from the detection of neutron star mergers by the gravitational wave observatories LIGO and Virgo.<\/p>\n<p>The first detection of gravitational waves by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2017 was a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/neutron\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">neutron<\/a> star merger that mostly conformed to the expectations of astrophysicists. But the second detection, in 2,019 was a merger of two <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/neutron+stars\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">neutron stars<\/a> whose combined mass was unexpectedly large.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was so shocking that we had to start thinking about how to create a heavy neutron star without making it a pulsar,\u201d said Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new study showing how the explosion of a stripped massive star in a supernova can lead to the formation of a heavy neutron star or a light black hole resolves one of the most challenging puzzles to emerge from the detection of neutron star mergers by the gravitational wave observatories LIGO and Virgo. The [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128843\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}