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Facts for Prelims (FFP)
Source: IE
Context: An international team of astrophysicists, has made a ground-breaking discovery using gravitational waves.
- They detected a merger between a neutron star and a mysterious object located in the “mass gap,” which is the range between the heaviest neutron stars and the lightest black holes.
- Named GW230529, this merger occurred about 650 million light-years away from Earth.
- While the lighter object is likely a neutron star, the more massive one could be a black hole within the mass gap, possibly the lightest ever discovered.
Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time caused by the acceleration of massive objects, such as black holes or neutron stars.
They are so faint that Albert Einstein, who first predicted their existence in 1916, believed they would never be detected.
