Imagine you’re an astronomer with bright ideas about the hidden laws of the cosmos. Like any good scientist, you craft an experiment to test your hypothesis.
Then comes bad news – there’s no way to carry it out, except maybe in a computer simulation. For cosmic objects are way too unwieldy for us to grow them in Petri dishes or smash them together as we do with subatomic particles.
Thankfully, though, there are rare places in space where nature has thrown together experiments of its own – like PSR J0337+1715. First observed in 2012 and announced in 2014, this triple system is 4200 light years away in the constellation Taurus.
Its three dead stellar cores are winding through a ballet that could confirm – or revise – Einstein’s ideas about space-time. The stakes are high. In the 1970s, a system of two dead stars provided strong, albeit indirect, evidence backing Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and that the gravitational waves LIGO would eventually find actually existed. For that work, the researchers would eventually earn the Nobel prize.
Since announcing the triple system, its discoverers have kept mum on their progress. I figured it couldn’t hurt to check.
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