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Mergers of this magnitude are so violent that they shake the fabric of space-time by releasing gravitational waves which propagate in the cosmos like ripples on a pond. These mergers also fuel cataclysmic explosions that create heavy metals in an instant, raining their galactic neighbors on hundreds of platinum gold and turntables, the authors of the new study said in a statement. (Some scientists suspect that all gold and platinum on Earth thanks to old neutron star fusions close to our galaxy).
The astronomers of the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory (LIGO) have obtained concrete evidence that such mergers take place gravitational waves detected the pulsations of a stellar crash site for the first time in 2017. Unfortunately, these observations only started about 12 hours after the initial collision, leaving an incomplete picture of what the kilonova look like.
For their new study, an international team of scientists compared the partial data set of the 2017 merger to more complete observations of an alleged kilonova, occurring in 2016 and observed by several space telescopes. By examining the 2016 explosion in all available wavelengths (X-rays, radio and optics), the team found that this mysterious explosion was almost identical to the merger of 2017.
"It was an almost perfect match," said statement Eleonora Troja, a research associate at the University of Maryland (UMD). "The infrared the data for both events have similar brightness and exactly the same time scale. "
In 2016, a gold explosion appeared in a nearby galaxy. Astronomers have now identified it as a kilonova – an explosion resulting from the collision of two dead stars.
(Image credit: courtesy of the University of Maryland)
Thus, confirmed: the explosion of 2016 was indeed a massive galactic fusion, probably between two neutron stars, just like the discovery of LIGO in 2017. In addition, astronomers having begun to observe the explosion of 2016 a few moments later, the authors of the new study were able to glimpse the stellar debris left behind the explosion, which was not visible in the 2017 data of LIGO.
"The rest could be a highly magnetized hypermassive neutron star, known as the magnetar, which survived the collision and then collapsed in a black hole," said the co-author of the 39, study, Geoffrey Ryan, postdoctoral fellow at the UMD. "This is interesting because the theory suggests that a magnetar should slow down or even stop the production of heavy metals," however, large amounts of heavy metals were clearly visible in the 2016 observations.
All of this to say that when it comes to understanding the collisions between the most massive objects in the universe – and the resulting mysterious rains – scientists have even more questions than answers. .
Originally published on Science live.
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