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Kaboom!
LIGO Detects Fierce Collision of Neutron Stars for the First Time
LIGO Detects Fierce Collision of Neutron Stars for the First Time
Astronomers have now seen and heard a pair of dead stars collide, giving them the first glimpse of what they call a “cosmic forge,” where the world’s jewels were minted billions of years ago.
The collision rattled space-time and sent a wave of fireworks across the universe, setting off sensors in space and on Earth on Aug. 17 as well as producing a long loud chirp in antennas designed to study the Einsteinian ripples in the cosmic fabric known as gravitational waves. It set off a stampede around the world as astronomers scrambled to turn their telescopes in search of a mysterious and long-sought kind of explosion called a kilonova.
After two months of underground and social media rumblings, the first wave of news is being reported Monday about one of the least studied of cosmic phenomena: the merger of dense remnants known as neutron stars, the shrunken cores of stars that have collapsed and burst.
Such collisions are thought to have profoundly influenced the chemistry of the universe, creating many of the heavier elements in the universe, including almost all the precious metals like gold, silver, platinum and uranium. Which is to say that the atoms in your wedding band, in the pharaoh’s jewels and the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and still threaten us all were formed in a cosmic gong show that reverberated across the heavens billions of years ago.
As astronomers gather for news conferences in several cities around the world, a blizzard of papers are being published, including one in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that has 3,500 authors — a third of all the professional astronomers in the world — from 910 institutions. “That paper almost killed the paperwriting team,” said Vicky Kalogera, a Northwestern University astrophysicist who was one of 10 people who did the actual writing.
More papers are appearing in Nature and in Science, on topics including nuclear physics and cosmology.
“It’s the greatest fireworks show in the universe,” said David Reitze of the California Institute of Technology and the executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO.