multimessenger astronomy

multimessenger astronomy, the use of multiple “messengers”—light, cosmic rays, neutrinos, and gravitational waves—to study astronomical objects such as supernovae and merging neutron star binaries. Each of these messengers reveals a different aspect of the objects that emit them. Cosmic rays and neutrinos, in particular, come from deep within objects where processes take place at very high energies. Thus, more can be learned about such objects as gamma-ray bursts and active galactic nuclei than can be learned from studying their light alone.

For most of astronomy’s history, only one messenger, light, has been used, and, of light, only that visible to the eye was used. Beginning in 1932 with American physicist Karl Jansky’s detection of radio emissions from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, astronomers in the 20th century began observing the universe in the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays through microwaves.

In the 20th century, astronomers also began studying the universe in media other than light. Studies of radiation in balloon-borne instruments led to the discovery of cosmic rays—atomic nuclei and electrons that arrive at Earth with very high energies. Understanding how the Sun shines through nuclear fusion led to efforts to detect the neutrinos given off in those fusion reactions. Neutrinos are very small chargeless subatomic particles that rarely interact with other matter, and, beginning in the 1960s, experiments were built to detect these neutrinos. The final messenger, gravitational waves, consists of very small ripples in space-time caused by the movement of very large objects. After decades of work, they were finally detected in 2015.

Multimessenger astronomy proved its usefulness immediately when the first neutrino detectors failed to observe the amount of neutrinos predicted on the basis of the Sun’s luminosity. This deficit, the solar neutrino problem, led to the discovery that the neutrino, previously thought to be massless, actually has a very small mass. Extrasolar neutrinos were first observed from Supernova (SN) 1987A and actually arrived at Earth an hour before the light. Although only 19 such neutrinos were observed out of the 10⁵⁷ emitted, astronomers were able to confirm that SN 1987A had happened as models predicted.

The first multimessenger observation involving gravitational waves happened on August 17, 2017, when the observatories LIGO and Virgo detected the merger of a binary neutron star about 40 megaparsecs (1 megaparsec = 3.26 million light-years) away. Just 1.7 seconds after the merger was observed, the Fermi and Swift space telescopes observed the resulting gamma-ray burst. Even that short interval was enough to show, to a very high level of precision, that gravity travels at the same speed as light.

Observatories all over the world that observe the four different messengers have joined to form the Astrophysical Multi-Messenger Observatory Network (AMON), which will provide a central clearinghouse so that when an interesting observation of a messenger happens that is likely to be a multimessenger event, an alert will be sent throughout the network. New, more-sensitive observatories are being built to detect each of the cosmic messengers. Among the problems that these observatories will seek to solve are the origins of the high-energy neutrino and ultra-high-energy cosmic ray backgrounds and what exactly happens when black holes merge.