{"id":22256,"date":"2016-02-17T15:47:22","date_gmt":"2016-02-17T23:47:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/ligos-black-holes-may-have-lived-and-died-inside-a-huge-star"},"modified":"2017-06-04T10:54:15","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T17:54:15","slug":"ligos-black-holes-may-have-lived-and-died-inside-a-huge-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/ligos-black-holes-may-have-lived-and-died-inside-a-huge-star","title":{"rendered":"LIGO\u2019s black holes may have lived and died inside a huge star"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ligos-black-holes-may-have-lived-and-died-inside-a-huge-star.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>But now it seems that collision may have been followed by a bright <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/dn19681-most-powerful-gamma-ray-bursts-linked-to-black-holes\/\">burst of gamma rays<\/a>. NASA\u2019s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1602.03920\">detected such an eruption<\/a> just 0.4 seconds after LIGO\u2019s gravitational waves arrived at Earth. It\u2019s not clear whether the same event triggered both signals, but the Fermi team calculated that the probability of a coincidence was just 0.0022.<\/p>\n<p>The problem is that no one expected such a bright gamma-ray burst to accompany a black-hole merger. Coalescing black holes orbit each other in a cosmic do-si-do, clearing out a region of empty space. According to models of gamma-ray bursts, isolated black holes can\u2019t ignite them.<\/p>\n<p><b>Strange signal<\/b><\/p>\n<p>\u201cEverything smells like a short gamma-ray burst in our signal,\u201d says Valerie Connaughton of the Fermi team. \u201cAnd that\u2019s a real problem in a way \u2013 you don\u2019t expect this signal from merging black holes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2077783-ligos-black-holes-may-have-lived-and-died-inside-a-huge-star\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>But now it seems that collision may have been followed by a bright burst of gamma rays. NASA\u2019s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope detected such an eruption just 0.4 seconds after LIGO\u2019s gravitational waves arrived at Earth. It\u2019s not clear whether the same event triggered both signals, but the Fermi team calculated that the probability of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22256","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\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22256"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62828,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22256\/revisions\/62828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}