How the elongated merger orbit points to where the pair was born ⚡ экспресс
Original: "Inferring host environment properties and gravitational-wave decay time from the eccentricity measurement of dynamically captured binaries"
Gravitational waves from a neutron star-black hole merger revealed the stellar 'neighborhood' where they collided.
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Sometimes a black hole and a neutron star meet not on a straight track but in a crowded stellar cluster, where chance brings them together. The orbit of such a merger becomes elongated — scientists can read this elongation and determine in which cluster the catastrophe occurred. For event GW200105, suspicion falls on a nuclear cluster with a 71% probability. From now on, every new eccentric merger will have its own 'address'.
🎯 Even a single elongated gravitational merger orbit is ironclad proof that the pair was born not in emptiness but in a dense stellar metropolis.