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<blockquote data-quote="freyar" data-source="post: 6821408" data-attributes="member: 40227"><p>Right, for merging black holes, you wouldn't expect to see anything else.&nbsp; For merging neutron stars, you would expect to see a lot of light, actually.&nbsp; I don't know the detailed numbers, but it's a little more optimistic than Umbran mentions, though.&nbsp; You see, the matter in the colliding neutron stars is so dense that the light would take a while (probably a few hours) to work its way out, so the light flash would probably be delayed compared to the gravitational waves (at least this is true of supernovae, which are similar but actually less extreme --- the light flash comes after the neutrino flash).&nbsp; This is actually extremely interesting, as there are astrophysical phenomena called gamma ray bursts that we know are (1) extremely far away and (2) extremely energetic that have been postulated to be neutron star mergers.&nbsp; A major science goal would be to correlate a gamma ray burst with a gravitational wave signature to confirm (or disprove) that hypothesis.&nbsp; Fortunately, there are some gamma ray telescopes that are nondirectional or at least have a wide field of view.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="freyar, post: 6821408, member: 40227"] Right, for merging black holes, you wouldn't expect to see anything else. For merging neutron stars, you would expect to see a lot of light, actually. I don't know the detailed numbers, but it's a little more optimistic than Umbran mentions, though. You see, the matter in the colliding neutron stars is so dense that the light would take a while (probably a few hours) to work its way out, so the light flash would probably be delayed compared to the gravitational waves (at least this is true of supernovae, which are similar but actually less extreme --- the light flash comes after the neutrino flash). This is actually extremely interesting, as there are astrophysical phenomena called gamma ray bursts that we know are (1) extremely far away and (2) extremely energetic that have been postulated to be neutron star mergers. A major science goal would be to correlate a gamma ray burst with a gravitational wave signature to confirm (or disprove) that hypothesis. Fortunately, there are some gamma ray telescopes that are nondirectional or at least have a wide field of view. [/QUOTE]

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