 Welcome back to the conversation on episode 10.32. We talked about a lot of things featuring Dave Mastin of Mastin Space Systems, but one of the things we didn't get to was this news story by Jared. Jared, tell me a little bit more about the neutron stars and their little dance. Yeah, so I really don't like spreading rumors. So here's a rumor about a potential discovery from LIGO, which is the laser interferometer. We've got two of them, one in Hanford, Washington, another in Louisiana. Also, Europe has one that's online as well to detect gravitational waves called Virgo. So this whole mess started on August 17th when Jay Craig Wheeler, who's an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, tweeted out, New LIGO data, source with optical counterpart, will blow your socks off. Now, a few other scientists who work on projects on LIGO, also tweeted out similar tweets as well. And then all of a sudden, all these tweets were deleted very, very quickly by everybody. Now, what is so big about an optical counterpart? Because that was the thing that everyone was really sort of talking about. Well, an optical counterpart basically means that something that caused the gravitational waves that we detected has actually been seen in the electromagnetic spectrum. So anywhere ranging from radio all the way up to gamma rays. So the three gravitational waves that have been detected before this do not have optical counterparts that we can actually see. So this would be a very big deal with it as well. Now, a lot of these tweets were citing this galaxy and this image right here, which is very conveniently named NGC 4993. And it is 130 million light years away from us. So that's quite far. And a horrible name. And a horrible name for it. We'll just call it Bartholomew for now. So in this galaxy, Bartholomew, this galaxy has come under the scrutiny of many scientists because the day after this flurry of tweets came out and then was promptly deleted, a public record show that NASA's Fermi gamma ray space telescope was looking at this galaxy. And then all of a sudden the next day, the Hubble space telescope was looking at this galaxy. And that same day, the Chandra X-ray Observatory was looking at this galaxy. And in fact in the proposal that was written up to use Chandra, it actually says in order to verify potential optical counterpart from LIGO Virgo detection. So suddenly this secret thing that had actually occurred that we really shouldn't have talked about. Yeah, they actually just put it right in writing on the actual proposal for the thing. So the European Southern Observatory's very large telescope has also looked at NGC 4993. And basically the rumor mill has sort of gone from rumor mill to yeah, they're probably looking at an optical counterpart. And it's very exciting because this is the first time that we are going to actually have a optical counterpart to go with a gravitational wave. And very specifically with this too, because of the space telescopes that were specifically looking at the object, we can infer from that that this was a collision between two neutron stars, basically two neutron stars, spiraling into each other and then eventually merging. And that's what generated these gravitational waves that were detected. The three previous gravitational waves before this were black holes that were actually spiraling into each other to merge. So spiraling neutron stars merging together is something that we have hypothesized should happen in the universe. And this would be one of the first direct detections of that. And it's a very exciting way that we were able to do that, especially because these types of mergers are not as energetic as black holes merging together. So the gravitational waves from two neutron stars merging together is radically different from what you would find in black holes. And it requires a level of proficiency in understanding what a gravitational wave should look like. So this means that not only did we detect these waves, we actually have the ability to detect them. And that's just as important as actually detecting the wave itself. So some really, really cool stuff. And then just the final bit that I always like to throw in here about these gravitational waves is that Einstein's theory of relativity says that this should occur. So that means that this is another mark up that says Einstein's theory of general relativity is true. And the reason that that is such a significant thing is because we actually have not had a single piece of evidence say that the theory of general relativity doesn't work. And that's really weird, because in most things in science you present it, you test it, you look at how it compares to nature. And then if you need to make modifications, you figure out how to make those modifications. With the theory of general relativity, which by the way was proposed in 1916. So it's not like this is a brand new thing that just came out of nowhere. It's over 101 years old. It's perfect so far. This is really weird. This doesn't happen in science very often. Someone like Einstein also say with gravitational waves we would probably never be able to make those. Einstein himself said that the waves are so small because these waves that we're detecting are literally basically moving space-time and distorting it at about one thousandth the width of a proton. So not just an atomic particle, a subatomic particle break that up a thousand times in a thousand equal pieces and only one of those thousand equal pieces is the actual movement or distortion, if you will, that we are detecting. And Einstein said we're probably never going to have the instrumentation to actually do that. And here we have the instrumentation. And here we are doing it. That's pretty incredible. I can only imagine what we'll be able to do in the future. Yeah, that'd be pretty sweet. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jared. For more news, head on over to our archived episode of 10.32. We've got additional news items in there. We've also had a great interview with Dave Mastin. And coming up next week at 1800 Universal Time this Saturday, we've got Stuart Money, the founder and CEO of interspace.net. He wrote a book called Here Be Dragons, The Rise of SpaceX and the Journey to Mars. And we're going to be talking all about SpaceX. Don't forget to subscribe and like this episode and stay tuned for next week's show.