Scientists spot stars crashing together in collision that shook the universe... and produced gold
Scientists have spotted an almost unimaginably violent collision between two super-heavy neutron stars – which literally shook the universe.
It heralds a ‘new age of astronomy’ scientists say – and the collisions, which send tremors through the universe in the form of gravity waves, are also the source of the gold or platinum in our wedding rings.
The collision was the first in history where the light was detected by telescopes – and the gravity waves were also detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in the United States.
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Neutron stars, formed when massive stars explode in supernovas, are so dense that they weigh two or three times the mass of our Sun, even though they’re roughly the size of a city on Earth.
A teaspoon of neutron star material has a mass of about a billion tons.
Observations confirmed that the collision of the two neutron stars – among the densest objects in the universe – also touched off a violent jet of hot plasma known as a gamma-ray burst in a galaxy about 138 million light-years from Earth.
Berkeley professor of astronomy and physics Eliot Quataert said, ‘We were anticipating LIGO finding a neutron star merger in the coming years but to see it so nearby — for astronomers — and so bright in normal light has exceeded all of our wildest expectations. And, even more amazingly, it turns out that most of our predictions of what neutron star mergers would look like as seen by normal telescopes were right!’
Based on the brightness and color of the light emitted following the merger, astronomers can now say that the gold and platinum on our planet was in all likelihood forged during the brief but violent merger of two orbiting neutron stars somewhere in the universe
‘We have been working for years to predict what the light from a neutron merger would look like,’ said Daniel Kasen, an associate professor of physics and of astronomy at UC Berkeley and a scientist at Berkeley Lab. ‘Now that theoretical speculation has suddenly come to life.’
