Posted on 07/14/2021 4:19:38 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Explanation: What happens when a black hole destroys a neutron star? Analyses indicate that just such an event created gravitational wave event GW200115, detected in 2020 January by LIGO and Virgo observatories. To better understand the unusual event, the featured visualization was created from a computer simulation. The visualization video starts with the black hole (about 6 times the Sun's mass) and neutron star (about 1.5 times the Sun's mass) circling each other, together emitting an increasing amount of gravitational radiation. The picturesque pattern of gravitational wave emission is shown in blue. The duo spiral together increasingly fast until the neutron star becomes completely absorbed by the black hole. Since the neutron star did not break apart during the collision, little light escaped -- which matches the lack of an observed optical counterpart. The remaining black hole rings briefly, and as that dies down so do the emitted gravitational waves. The 30-second time-lapse video may seem short, but it actually lasts about 1000 times longer than the real merger event.
Beautiful! Fascinating to note that while there are minor perturbations in the neutron star’s geometry as its orbit decays, actual spaghettification doesn’t begin to occur until contact is made with the event horizon. Even at that point, the extreme gravity of the neutron star keeps it intact. Interesting that they chose not to model what the change to the event horizon would look like. As the mass of the neutron star is added, the diameter of the event horizon will invariably expand. And as the mass of the neutron star in this simulation is a large fraction of the mass of the black hole, there should be a pretty substantial change.
It is also interesting to see the gravity wave at the bottom of the screen. When the neutron star passes through the event horizon the gravity wave stops. I wonder if this is what the newly discovered gravity waves for black hole collisions look like. I wonder what the collision of two neutron stars looks like.
I suspect sunblock 1,000,000 would not be enough for the radiation within a few lightyears.
Don’t forget the eye protection!
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