Neutron Star Merger - The Mysterious Explosion of Energy

It all began on August 17th at 8:41 a.m. Eastern Time when LIGO interferometer identified a clear gravitational wave signal that lasted about a hundred seconds which is way longer than any previous detection and it's consistent with theoretical predictions for the signal from two merging neutron stars around one point seen seconds.

The key was to locate where in the sky this neutron star merger occurred unlike a merger of black holes neutron stars emit light when they smash together and continue emitting electromagnetic radiation afterwards. The Fermi gamma-ray Space Telescope identified a large patch of the sky roughly the size of six thousand full moons using the European Space Agency's integral gamma ray satellite.

Every interferometer has some blind spots where if the waves are coming at that angle it’s symmetric with respect to the two arms and so it just can't be detected. So this helped further narrow the search area down to the size of about 144 full moons now within that area around fifty galaxies were identified to be studied with optical telescopes and just 11 hours after the initial detection astronomers located a bright spot in the galaxy NGC for 993.

So what are neutron stars well they're the leftover cores of big stars that have exploded they've gone supernova now those remaining cores are squeezed down by gravity and if they're too big say larger than two or three solar masses well they will keep on getting crushed until they collapse in on themselves forever and become a black hole.

But if those cores are a little smaller say 1.1 and 1.6 times the mass of our Sun as they were in this case well then they get squeezed still and so electrons merge with protons to form neutrons and neutrinos and the neutrinos take off and the neutrons are left in a really densely packed star and the only reason the neutrons don't combine with each other is because of a quantum principle.

Hundreds of millions of light years away the collision of neutron stars creates a killer nova which spews debris out into space this is debris that glows allowing us to observe what's been created and in fact the new observations with light telescopes have shown that heavy elements like gold lead and platinum were made in this event and that helps us understand where a lot of the heavy elements in our universe come from.

In my view this event really shows us that we're in a new age of astronomy we can detect gravitational waves not just from black holes but now from neutron stars we can use that information to locate places in the sky where that occurred and we can validate that with our other telescopes looking in all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

So now we really have more tools to understand our universe and I just can't wait for the questions that we're going to address next and all of the different things we're going to be able to study as the gravitational wave observatory z' get better and better it's a phenomenal time to be studying the universe.