Monitoring the Collision of Two Neutron Stars Opens New Horizons for Science

Professor Stephen Smartt speaks at a press conference in Germany about the unique astronomical event observed by a fleet of telescopes.
Astronomers have for the first time observed a rare astronomical event, the collision of two neutron stars. This was detected by waves through space-time tissue and a flash of bighter than one billion suns, opening up new horizons for science.

Neutron stars are a kind of residue that results from the gravitational collapse of a huge star in a supernova, consisting mainly of neutrons, and its density is very high and its temperature is high.

At this extraordinary event, 130 million light-years away, neutron starbursts were intensely dense and then collided violently and collapsed instantly to form a black hole. The explosion resulted in the release of a tremendous amount of energy and matter.

It is one of the most important astronomical discoveries of our time. It answers some basic questions about the universe and brings about other discoveries in the future. This monitoring will have far-reaching implications for scientists across a range of different fields.

The first actual event was observed by the LIGO Gravitational-Wave Observatory in August, astronomers were alerted all over the Earth, and within a few hours there were seventy Earth and space monitoring devices—including telescopes capable of monitoring gamma rays, x-rays and light Visual and radio signals—were set to follow the event that became the first event to be "seen" through gravitational waves and light.

As the stars began to approach, all those mechanical eyes were fixed on one point in space, and a tremendous amount of data was picked up that could change our understanding of how the universe worked.

Interestingly, the data collected by the scientists revealed that heavy materials—such as gold and platinum, whose origins the scientists did not know—were probably a by-product of this collision. Scientists now estimate that at least half of the gold found in the universe is in similar events.

But gold was not the only news in this cosmic collision. The collision of the two neutron stars generated gravitational waves that were discovered on Earth by the LIGO observatory in the United States, which strengthened Einstein's predictions a century ago.