In 2017, gravitational waves and light were observed coming from the merger of a pair of neutron stars. The discovery proved that gravitational wave sources could also be viewed at visible, X-ray, and even gamma-ray wavelengths, but has remained the only such event observed to date. Now, researchers have identified a “cosmic look-alike” — an event they believe came from the same type of system as the one that produced the gravitational waves.
Such a discovery would double the number of known events of this type. “It’s a big step to go from one detected object to two,” said Eleonora Troja of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and lead author of the study published October 16 in Nature Communications, in a press release. The paper focuses on a gamma-ray burst, called GRB 150101B, seen by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in 2015. Troja’s team followed up using NASA’s Chandra X-ray ...
