Light captured alongside a gravitational wave for the first time ever

University of Bath astrophysicists have been closely involved in the first ever combined detection of both light and gravitational waves from the merging of two neutron stars, a cataclysmic cosmic event. The findings, involving an international team of thousands using a global collection of gravitational wave detectors and groundand space-based astronomical telescopes, heralds a new era in modern astrophysics and help us understand the most powerful and violent events in the Universe. Neutron stars are the collapsed remnants produced in the violent death throes of massive stars; they are only about 20 kilometres in diameter, but contain more mass than our Sun - making them the smallest and densest stars in the universe. They are so dense that one sugar cube of neutron star material would weigh one billion tons. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted that ripples in space-time would be produced if dense cosmic objects spin around one another and finally coalesce. The first detection of gravitational waves from pairs of massive black holes were reported in the 2015 and resulted in the award of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. For the mergers of the black hole pairs, no light was detected, nor was this expected due to the light-trapping nature of black holes.