UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A team of Penn State astronomers has been instrumental in the confirmation of a scientific theory that gamma ray bursts are caused by the merging and explosion of two neutron stars.
On Aug. 17, Penn State astronomers in charge of Mission Control for NASA’s Swift satellite received a message that LIGO — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — had detected a possible event: that of two neutron stars colliding.
LIGO is the world’s largest gravitational wave observatory, and the entire Swift team, worldwide, scrapped everything else they had to do that day to study the rare event.
“When I saw the text message, I knew everything we had planned for the day was out the window,” Jamie A. Kennea, head of the Swift Science Operations team and associate research professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State. “We’ve been waiting for a neutron to neutron merger.”