Black Holes Merging with Neutron Stars ( THE BIG CRUNCH?)

This Blogger seems to have an inordinately high ratio of astrophysicists reading the MAXEY CHRONICLES.

Perhaps because this Blogger dabbles in cosmology; believing that the trek to confirming the existence of God is through the anomalies, mysteries  and consistencies currently being discovered by astrophysicists.

Recently there has been an uptick in observations of  black holes merging with neutron stars.

“On august 14th, just after 9pm Universal Time, a ripple of gravitational waves reached Earth. Until a few years ago no one would have noticed such an event. But 2015 saw the reopening, after an upgrade, of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (ligo), a pair of detectors in Washington state and Louisiana. These were joined in 2017 by Virgo, an upgraded instrument in Italy. Together, the three instruments not only recorded the wave’s passage, they also worked out where in the sky it had come from and then texted that information to the world’s astronomers.

This stimulated the deployment of a host of other devices, to look at the wave’s point of origin near the border between the constellations of Cetus and Sculptor. Telescopes capable of examining all parts of the spectrum, from gamma rays to radio waves, were brought into play. And, courtesy of IceCube, an instrument at the South Pole, the sky was also scanned for tiny particles known as neutrinos that might have been released by whatever humungous event it was that had disturbed the fabric of the space-time continuum to create such a gravitational ripple.

The provisional conclusion of all this “multimessenger” activity is that the detectors were witness to the merger, 900m light-years away, of a neutron star and a black hole—an event prosaically dubbed S190814bv by ligo’s masters. If confirmed, S190814bv will the first such merger discovered (previous gravitational-wave observations were of two black holes or two neutron stars colliding). As in many other walks of life, three may be taken as a trend, and the detection of this third type of event thus marks the coming of age of the new field of gravitational astronomy.

Gravitational waves are distortions of space-time that transmit the force of gravity from one place to another. They were predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 as part of his general theory of relativity…the waves’ expected size was so small that Einstein himself doubted they would be measurable.

That changed with the discovery of dense, massive objects such as neutron stars (the remnants of supernova explosions) and black holes (objects of various origin in which mass is so concentrated that even light cannot escape their gravity fields). Calculations showed that mergers between these sorts of objects would produce gravitational waves that might be detectable by big enough, sensitive enough instruments…. a signal from the merger of two black holes, in September 2015. Since then, it and Virgo have recorded and confirmed another nine such events, and also noted the merger of two neutron stars. If S190814bv does prove to have been a neutron star/black hole merger, that will make it easier to compare and contrast these different types of event….

Black holes and neutron stars form when large stars run out of fuel and collapse. Though both are heavy and dense, their physical natures are strikingly different. Neutron stars, as their name suggests, are made largely of neutrons. These are constituents of ordinary matter, found in the nuclei of all atoms except the lightest isotope of hydrogen, which is a lone proton. Black holes, by contrast, are “singularities”. 

This means they have no internal structure, only mass.

….some astronomers seek to use gravitational waves to understand the structure of cosmic objects, others want to employ this new era of astronomy to test the limits of the general theory of relativity. So far, every prediction made by this theory has been borne out, yet physicists know that relativity cannot be the last word on matters gravitational because it stubbornly refuses to mesh with quantum theory, which is the best available explanation for everything else in the universe. ….THE ECONOMIST.”

The conventional theory among astrophysicists is that the universe has been  continually expanding since the BIG BANG. Under that theory the reason for Mankind seeing so many collisions in space now is because of a higher grade of instrumentation.

However, let us ponder that perhaps the increased frequency of collisions is not due to better instrumentation but due to the fact the Universe is not expanding but Collapsing; it is getting crowded in the neighborhood.

“In a closed universe, gravity eventually stops the expansion of the universe, after which it starts to contract until all matter in the universe collapses to a point, a final singularity termed the "Big Crunch", the opposite of the Big Bang.”

If these celestial collisions are indeed getting more frequent because of Collapse,  this Blogger believes that his astrophysicist Readers should start taking a look at Hindi theology.

“According to Hindu cosmology, there is no absolute start to time, as it is considered infinite and cyclic. Similarly, the space and universe has neither start nor end, rather it is cyclical….”

Black Hole devouring neutron star