Did a Gamma Ray Burst Accompany LIGO’s Gravity Wave Detection?

Did a Gamma Ray Burst Accompany LIGO’s Gravity Wave Detection?


Last week’s announcement that Gravitational Waves (GW) have been detected for the first time—as a result of the merger of two black holes—is huge news. But now a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) originating from the same place, and that arrived at Earth 0.4 seconds after the GW, is making news.

Isolated black holes aren’t supposed to create GRB’s; they need to be near a large amount of matter to do that.NASA’s Fermi telescope detected the GRB, coming from the same point as the GW, a mere 0.4 seconds after the waves arrived.

Though we can’t be absolutely certain that the two phenomena are from the same black hole merger, the Fermi team calculates the odds of that being a coincidence at only 0.0022%. That’s a pretty solid correlation.So what’s going on here? To back up a little, let’s look at what we thought was happening when LIGO detected gravitational waves.Our understanding was that the two black holes orbited each other for a long time.

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