#gravitationalwaves — Public Fediverse posts

🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-09-05

A supermassive black hole literally kicked out of its own galaxy by a lopsided merger, now sailing through intergalactic space alone 🚀 Gravity as the ultimate eviction notice. Absolutely unhinged physics.

🔗 https://dailygalaxy.com/2026/09/a-black-hole-was-seen-escaping-its-galaxy/

#BlackHole #Astrophysics #GravitationalWaves #EventHorizon

How it all began almost exactly 31 years ago:

Karsten Danzmann breaks the ground for the German-British gravitational-wave detector GEO600 on 4 September 1995. He did not have to dig the two 600 meter long arm trenches all by himself, though 😉

Until the end of 1995 the foundations for the central building were done and the arm trenches were prepared.

➡️ https://www.geo600.org/66095/1995

#GEO600Highlights #GEO600 ^#Research #ScienceHistory #GravitationalWaves

🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-09-04

The record-breaking merger might be a mass illusion from spin-precession warping the waveform! Wild that spacetime ripples can trick our mass estimates this badly 🌀🕳️

🔗 https://phys.org/news/2026-09-biggest-black-hole-merger-massive.html

#BlackHole #Astrophysics #GravitationalWaves #EventHorizon

🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-09-04

The record-breaking merger might be a mass illusion from spin-precession warping the waveform! Wild that spacetime ripples can trick our mass estimates this badly 🌀🕳️

🔗 https://phys.org/news/2026-09-biggest-black-hole-merger-massive.html

#BlackHole #Astrophysics #GravitationalWaves #EventHorizon

🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-09-03

A LIGO signal matching a 137+101 solar mass merger forming a 230-mass hole might actually be something even weirder in disguise! Nature loves to troll our detectors right at the edge of the pair-instability mass gap 🌀

🔗 https://www.science.org/content/article/extreme-black-hole-merger-may-be-cosmic-illusion

#BlackHole #Astrophysics #GravitationalWaves #EventHorizon

🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-09-03

A LIGO signal matching a 137+101 solar mass merger forming a 230-mass hole might actually be something even weirder in disguise! Nature loves to troll our detectors right at the edge of the pair-instability mass gap 🌀

🔗 https://www.science.org/content/article/extreme-black-hole-merger-may-be-cosmic-illusion

#BlackHole #Astrophysics #GravitationalWaves #EventHorizon

🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-09-03

A LIGO signal matching a 137+101 solar mass merger forming a 230-mass hole might actually be something even weirder in disguise! Nature loves to troll our detectors right at the edge of the pair-instability mass gap 🌀

🔗 https://www.science.org/content/article/extreme-black-hole-merger-may-be-cosmic-illusion

#BlackHole #Astrophysics #GravitationalWaves #EventHorizon

📣 New title image 🖼️

The image shows results from computer simulations of neutron star mergers at five different times (from less then 2 to about 120 milliseconds) after the merger. Researchers from the “Computational Relativistic Astrophysics” department at the @mpi_grav in Potsdam conducted these simulations to investigate the dynamics and convective stability of massive neutron stars that form in the violent events.

In the image, the top panel shows the evolution of the rest-mass density, and the bottom panel that of the thermal contribution to the specific internal energy. The image is from Fig. 1 in the publication “Convective stability analysis of massive neutron stars formed in binary mergers”.

➡️ https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/w8gq-3d54 [Open Access publication]

#NeutronStar #Astrophysics #GravitationalWaves #Astronomy #Astrodon

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 06/06/2026

Another Saturday, another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further five papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 119 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 567.

I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.

The first paper to report this week, published on Tuesday 2nd June, is “The impact of the formation channel on gravitational-wave-galaxy cross-correlations” by Kabir Chakravarti (Chennai Mathematical Institute, India) and Federico R Urban (CEICO-FZU, Czech Republic). This article, published in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, explores how uncertainties in binary formation affect the cross-correlation signal between gravitational wave events and galaxy catalogues, finding that time-delay distribution significantly impacts the signal.

The overlay for this paper is here

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116679308847047911

The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday 2nd June but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “Transient X-ray Sources as Extremely Eccentric Mass-Transfer Binaries with Compact Companions” by Jonathan I Katz and Michael A Nowak (Washington University, St Louis, USA). This article suggests that X-ray transients, similar to tidal disruption events, are produced in eccentric stellar-compact object binaries, with their frequency gradually increasing over time.

The overlay for this one looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116679395198117735

Next one up, the third paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 2nd June in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena is “Resolving the (Debate About) Nozzle Shocks in Tidal Disruption Events” by Zachary L. Andalman & Eliot Quataert (Princeton U., USA), Eric R. Coughlin (Syracuse U. USA) and C. J. Nixon (U. Leeds, UK). This paper presents a model to understand the role of nozzle shocks in the circularization of stellar debris during a tidal disruption event when a star approaches a supermassive black hole (SMBH)

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116679426224933831

The fourth paper this week, published on Wednesday 3rd June in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Validating Digital Twins of the Local Universe with the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Signal” by Richard Stiskalek (University of Oxford, UK) and Harry Desmond (University of Portsmouth, UK). The thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect and constrained simulations are used to analyze the thermal pressure of ionized gas in galaxy clusters and produce a set of digital twins for cosmological study.

The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here and here is the Mastodon announcement:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116684470440285496

The fifth and final paper this week, published on Thursday 4th June in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Photon (Non)Conservation in the Reduced Speed of Light Approximation and How to (Almost) Fix It” by Nickolay Y. Gnedin (University of Chicago, USA). The “Reduced Speed of Light” approximation in cosmological simulations can lead to photon non-conservation, and while some missing photons can be counted, adding them back is challenging.

The overlay for this one is here:

The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on arXiv here and Mastodon announcement here

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116691566968428861

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one next Saturday.

🎉 Happy belated birthday, GW230529!

Two years and a few days ago, the @LIGO Livingston gravitational-wave detector observed a remarkable gravitational-wave signal.

ℹ️ https://www.aei.mpg.de/1138125/mysterious-object-in-the-gap

Detected soon after the beginning of the fourth joint observing run of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaborations, the signal came from the merger of a compact object with 1.3 to 2.1 times the mass of our Sun with another compact object with 2.6 to 4.7 times the solar mass.

Astronomers believe that the lighter object is a neutron star and the heavier is a lightweight black hole.

How that lightweight black hole formed is unknown. Its masse falls into the “lower mass gap” between the heaviest neutron stars and the lightest black holes.

📄 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad5beb

Image: I. Markin (@unipotsdam), T. Dietrich (@unipotsdam and @mpi_grav) H. Pfeiffer, A. Buonanno (@mpi_grav)

#GW230529 #GravitationalWaves #MassGap #BlackHole #NeutronStar #Astronomy

💡 Breakthrough in simulating how neutron stars collide 💥

Longest self-consistent numerical-relativity simulation to date reveals details of black hole and jet formation and advances multi-messenger astronomy.

ℹ️ https://www.aei.mpg.de/1249127/breakthrough-in-simulating-how-neutron-stars-collide

📄 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.211407

Picture: K. Hayashi / @mpi_grav

#NeutronStar #Astrophysics #BlackHole #MultiMessengerAstronomy #Kilonova #Jet #Astronomy #GravitationalWaves

NASA’s Tiny BurstCube Mission Launches to Study Cosmic Blasts https://science.nasa.gov/burstcube/nasas-tiny-burstcube-mission-launches-to-study-cosmic-blasts/ #NASA #Astrophysics #BurstCube #CubeSats #GammaRays #GammaRayBursts #GoddardSpaceFlightCenter #GravitationalWaves #InternationalSpaceStationISS #NeutronStars #SensingTheUniverseMultimessengerAstronomy

NASA’s Tiny BurstCube Mission Launches to Study Cosmic Blasts https://science.nasa.gov/burstcube/nasas-tiny-burstcube-mission-launches-to-study-cosmic-blasts/ #NASA #Astrophysics #BurstCube #CubeSats #GammaRays #GammaRayBursts #GravitationalWaves #InternationalSpaceStationISS #NeutronStars #SensingTheUniverseMultimessengerAstronomy #TheUniverse