Remember the LIGO device, used to detect gravity waves? Now it’s caught two neutron stars in the act. Eric Betz on D-brief has a nice description:
An artist’s illustration of two colliding neutron stars. (Credit: NASA/Swift/Dana Berry)
They were neutron stars — the collapsed cores left behind after giant stars explode into supernovas. Closer and closer they spun, shedding gravitational energy, until the stars traveled at nearly the speed of light, completing an orbit 100 times every second.
By then, dinosaurs reigned on Earth, and the first flowers were just blooming. That’s when, 130 million years ago, the dance ended.
The collision was fast and violent, likely spawning a black hole. A shudder — a gravitational wave — was sent out across the fabric of space-time. And as the stars’ outer layers launched into space, the force formed a vast cloud of subatomic particles that would cool into many Earths’ worth of gold, platinum and uranium.
Seconds later, a blast of high-energy gamma-rays – the most energetic kind of light – punched through the erupting cloud.
The space-time ripple and the light crossed the cosmos together, and finally arrived at 6:41 a.m. Eastern on Aug. 17. The gravitational wave first reached Italy’s freshly finished detector Advanced Virgo before stretching and squeezing the lasers at America’s two LIGO sites.
Two seconds later, NASA’s gamma-ray detecting Fermi spacecraft caught the blast.
Neat stuff. Including direct confirmation that heavy elements are created in these mergers.
