Gravitational Waves May Have Announced The End - But Probably Not
Almost all key telescopes are now pointed at Canis Minor. Gravitational waves that nobody expected came from there. A big benefit is the fact that the Betelgeuse star is not that far. But it shouldn't be responsible.
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Betelgeuse is slowly dimming and the hysteria about a supernova explosion is reaching its highest point. But, astronomers are calm and are trying to calm down the public as the popular red supergiant could be dying for another million years and that a supernova that will be brighter than the Moon and turn night into day is really not coming.
But even astronomers aren't made from steel. Not too many people not about this yet, but on Wednesday the 14th January bells started ringing at the American gravitational observatories LIGO Hanford, LIGO Livingston and in the Italian Santa Stefano and Macerata. And chaos ensued.
Soon it was shown that we have never seen gravitational waves like these. Nobody has any clue on how they got created. Well, unless it is all a mistake or some technical problems – that is still possible. When scientists build the LIGO and Virgo observatories and started hunting for gravitational waves they had a decent idea of how gravitational waves from black hole collisions and neutron star collisions should look like. And these came to be exactly right. We really detected the wailing of gravitational waves that were just like the predictions. But the gravitational waves from the 14th January are completely unexpected and no model or theory ever predicted them. So what are they?
The craziness – speculations immediately popped out whether it could maybe be a supernova explosion. And what really started the chaos is where the waves came from. From the Canis Minor constellation – and that was it, just a glance at the night sky map will tell you that it is very close to Betelgeuse.
Astronomers – and gravitational astronomers the most – now have a lot to do. On one hand, they have to attend to social networks and make the world sure that with all likelihood this wasn't a Betelgeuse supernova explosion. But at the same time, they must search for the real source of the mysterious gravitational waves.
So, many telescopes across the whole electromagnetic spectrum stop all current research and are now pointing at Canis Minor. It seems to be a small price for what could potentially be a huge discovery. It could be a so far unknown astrophysical process. But one of the possibilities is a supernova explosion – though more likely it is a more distant supernova rather than Betelgeuse. The chances of it being the explosion of the watched star are similar to us seeing attack ships being on fire of the shoulder of Orion
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