Xethinus t1_j282pt8 wrote on December 30, 2022 at 8:53 AM

We do.

Gravitational wave observatories are currently the best way to do it.

Okay, so maybe we wanna use telescopes. Remember the images of Sagittarius A* published in recent years? Took months(years?) to resolve, because it was so distance and that thing is massive.

Black holes are dense and tiny. So are neutron stars. We have trouble resolving the size of stars that are nearby and larger than our own, let alone stars that are mere kilometers across. The likelihood of an individual neutron star colliding with another neutron star to form a black hole within any resolveable distance is... astronomical.

It definitely would be an absolute treat to witness, and would be huge for the entire scientific community, but the closest neutron star collisions are outside of our galaxy.

Best we can do is point a telescope at a location and hope we get things like spectroscopy and light intensities to find out useful info. Build ever larger observatories that span solar systems. Wait a couple billion years and hope there are neutron star mergers in the milkdromeda galactic merge.

Jebusfreek666 OP t1_j283emb wrote on December 30, 2022 at 9:02 AM

>but the closest neutron star collisions are outside of our galaxy.

Those must just be the closest ones we have so far detected right? There is no reason our galaxy is different to the others. We should be able to locate something a little closer I think. Heck, maybe in the future we could actually cause the transformation to happen by artificially increasing the mass of the neutron star via a particle beam or some other tech...

Xethinus t1_j2848ur wrote on December 30, 2022 at 9:14 AM

I don't know how easy neutron stars are to find. I also don't know how easy binary neutron star systems are to find.

I do know we've been getting gravitational waves from all across the universe every few days from neutron star collisions and black hole mergers for the last few years. But that is a sample size of billions of cubic light-years of space. We're talking trillions of galaxies. A typical galaxy does not have a neutron star or black hole formation in any predictable way. I refer to the milkdromeda galactic merge for the most likely next neutron star collision anytime soon.

Now... engineering a black hole? That's bonkers. I would pay to see that. Someone get kurtzgesagt on that. Would become one of the most extreme science experiments possible.