Source: Interesting Engineering

An intrepid team of astrophysicists predicted that gravitational waves from double neutron stars — crucial to our understanding of the lives and deaths of all stars — might be detected by LISA, a next-generation space telescope.

Gravitational Waves and Double Neutron Stars

The team — led by Mike Lau, a Ph.D. student at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) — presented their results at the 14th annual Australian National Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (ANITA) science workshop 2020. The paper compares his team to paleontologists: “Like learning about a dinosaur from its fossil, we piece together the life of a binary star from their double neutron star fossils.”

Neutron stars are the hot, extremely radioactive “corpses” of a gigantic star after undergoing a cataclysmic explosion called a supernova. A double neutron star is two neutron stars orbiting one another in one system, which disturbs the surrounding space-time, like cosmic waves jamming through the universe.

These ripples are called gravitational waves and have made headlines in the last several years — notably the 2015 detection of waves made by the LIGO/Virgo Collaboration. Gravitational waves like these happen when pairs of black holes spiral in too close together and merge into one.

This is incredible, but scientists have yet to find a way to measure the gravitational waves created when two black holes or neutron stars still have a relatively high orbital distance. Their waves are weaker, but they also contain crucial data on the lives of stars, and could even unveil the existence of entirely new phenomena in the Milky Way.

Bending space-time with binary neutron stars

The new study shows how the Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) might one day record the gravitational waves from a pair of double neutron stars. LISA is a space telescope set to launch in 2034, and is a critical part of a larger mission that the European Space Agency (ESA) will lead. The space telescope is made of three satellites synced by lasers in a triangle, orbiting the Sun.

Source: Interesting Engineering