Gravitational waves have been spotted following another collision between two neutron stars. This is only the second ever observation of signals from this type of event—and we're still missing some details.What happened: These latest gravitational waves were detected last year by the interferometer at LIGO’s Livingston Observatory in Louisiana, scientists told the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii on January 5.
The crash: So far, we know that the neutron star merger occurred more than 500 million light-years away. Scientists have constrained the crash to a patch that makes up about 20 percent of the sky. There’s a slight possibility we’re looking at a neutron star colliding with a black hole, but for this to be the case, the black hole would have to be unusually small, and that doesn’t fit the data profile so far. Instead, it looks like we’re seeing the heaviest neutron star binary to date.