Approximately 140 million light years from Earth, in August 2017, gravitational waves from the collision of two neutron stars swept over our planet as they traveled across the universe. Now, a study that was just published in Nature has provided fresh insight into the physics of that phenomenon, known to scientists as GW170817.
Superluminal motion, or energy bursts that appear to travel faster than light, was produced by GW170817, which moved at a speed of about seven times the speed of light, according to MiMi. Scientists have now figured out how to use the Hubble Space Telescope to quantify it.
A turning point in astronomy occurred when scientists at the Leibniz Universität Hannover and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics detected both the gravitational waves and the light produced by that collision: Multi-messenger astronomy, a fusion of gravitational-wave and electromagnetic measurement, emerged as a new branch of the field.
