IF A neutron star spins furiously in the vacuum of space, does it make a sound? Yes, apparently, but it is sound with a gravitational twist.
Peter Shawhan at the University of Maryland, College Park, calls such objects “space-time sirens” and has been playing the noises they make to bemused colleagues at conferences for the last few months. He was inspired by the term “standard siren”, used by cosmologists to describe a pair of massive black holes spiralling towards each other.
Listen to the gravitational-wave signal that should be produced when two black holes or neutron stars spiral inward and…
