This year’s neutron star collision unlocks cosmic mysteries

BROUGHT TO LIGHT After gravitational waves narrowed down the region of sky where two neutron stars collided, telescopes pinpointed a spot of light (right, indicated with red lines) where none had been before (left).

Thousands of astronomers and physicists. Hundreds of hours of telescope observations. Dozens of scientific papers. Two dead stars uniting into one.

In 2017, scientists went all in on a never-before-seen astronomical event of astounding proportions: a head-on collision between two neutron stars, the ultradense remnants of exploded stars.

The smashup sent shivers of gravitational waves through Earth, and the light show that followed sent shivers of excitement down astronomers’ spines. A real-life scientific drama quickly unfolded as night after night, astronomers around the world raced the sunrise, capturing every possible bit of data before day broke at their observatories.

Scientists had long fantasized about using light together with gravitational waves to forge a new kind of astronomy capable of unlocking otherwise unknowable secrets of the cosmos. “Now we’re finally here,” says Vicky Kalogera, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Almost overnight, the discovery vanquished some theories and vindicated others. It has had implications for the origins of the universe’s heaviest elements, the mysterious dark energy that makes up about 70 percent of the cosmos and the source of brilliant-but-brief flashes of high-energy light known as short gamma-ray bursts. In the last two decades of astronomy, the detection “is more significant than any other event,” says theoretical astrophysicist Avi Loeb of Harvard University.

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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neutron-star-collision-top-science-stories-2017-yir