Just in Time to See and Hear a 130 Million Year Old Kilonova Explosion

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Neutron Stars colliding being witnessed is a really big deal in the geek world of astronomy, and this actually happened back in August of this year. These types of collisions are how it is believed that many of the heavy elements we know here on Earth are formed. The video below is from the NYT article on the topic and worth a look even if you have to eat the 15 second advert. Thanks cageymaru.

Check out the video.

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.
 
Well that's pretty bad ass.

Occasionally wonder what my life would have been with my initial-ish degree choice of astronomy/astro physics. Cest la vie.
 
Man, sucks to be whoever lived near that system, though any life in close proximity would have been killed by the radiation long before the explosion.
 
Armenius said:
Man, sucks to be whoever lived near that system, though any life in close proximity would have been killed by the radiation long before the explosion.
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Obviously space spider infestation. I mean regular spiders you kill with fire.. space spiders you have to collapse a few stars until they roll on that kilonova... or "killa'nova!" as the kids say.


spiders-in-space-the-experiment-james-temple.jpg

photo.jpg
 
modi123 said:
Obviously space spider infestation. I mean regular spiders you kill with fire.. space spiders you have to collapse a few stars until they roll on that kilonova... or "killa'nova!" as the kids say.


spiders-in-space-the-experiment-james-temple.jpg

photo.jpg
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True, they could have been trying to save the rest of us from a thargoid invasion.
 
Interesting nugget on information about the heavy metals created..

According to Stefan Ballmer, who helped build the Advanced LIGO detectors, the amount of gold produced by this one collision rivals the mass of our Moon:

"If you’re wondering how much the gold we saw being made is worth? About $10 octillion— $10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000—at today’s prices."

For those of you wondering, that's approximately 10^46 atoms of gold, or ten quadrillion times as much as we've mined in all of human history.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/starts...h-gravitational-waves-and-light/#1daa14d01725
 
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"For those of you wondering, that's approximately 1046 atoms of gold, or ten quadrillion times as much as we've mined in all of human history."

Hehe, notation fail right here: they actually said 10^46 atoms, not 1,046 atoms :D
 
Science is awesome. It is amazing how much work goes into each little step along the way, decades in the making if not more, to create this type of technology.

The exact same scientific method of observing, questioning, hypothesizing, gathering evidence, predicting, and theorizing demonstrated here is used across the scientific spectrum. Remember that next time any of you dismiss overwhelming evidence and scientific consensus.
 
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Just wait until we have the ability to directly manipulate protons and neutrons en masse. Just rip protons and the correct amount of neutrons depending on the isotope and we're in business.
 
Exercate said:
But...but.... Kyle? The New York Times? (Get a rope). Here's is a better source for Space news:

http://spaceref.com/unlocking-secrets-of-neutron-star-collision-1.html

or...

https://www.space.com/22078-inside-neutron-stars-graphic.html

Sorry - I had to. My cousin, My daughter, and a Son-in-Law all are in the space industry. Two of them worked at NASA, and one works for Lockheed Martin.
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Yeah, but the NYT video was a ton better, so it got the link. Put your bias away and just intake the science.
 
If, in space no one can hear you scream, then how could we hear this epic collision?

I say fake news!!
 
Ultima99 said:
Just wait until we have the ability to directly manipulate protons and neutrons en masse. Just rip protons and the correct amount of neutrons depending on the isotope and we're in business.
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First 3d printing from plasma
 
First Detection of Gravitational Waves from Neutron-Star Crash Marks New Era of Astronomy


For the first time, gravitational waves generated by the merger of two neutron stars have been detected. And that merger was ALSO confirmed optically!
Credit: Space.com / edited by Steve Spaleta

A new era of astronomy has begun.
For the first time ever, scientists have spotted both gravitational waves and light coming from the same cosmic event — in this case, the cataclysmic merger of two superdense stellar corpses known as neutron stars.

The landmark discovery initiates the field of "multimessenger astrophysics," which promises to reveal exciting new insights about the cosmos, researchers said. The find also provides the first solid evidence that neutron-star smashups are the source of much of the universe's gold, platinum and other heavy elements.

How do researchers describe the finding? "Superlatives fail," said Richard O'Shaughnessy, a scientist with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) project.

"This is a transformation in the way that we're going to do astronomy," O'Shaughnessy, who's based at the Rochester Institute of Technology's Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation, told Space.com. "It's fantastic."

aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA3MC84OTIvb3JpZ2luYWwvU1BfSHViYmxlX25ldXRyb25fc3Rhcl9tZXJnZXIuanBn

The Hubble Space Telescope was used to capture imagery of GW170817, the source of gravitational waves detected on Aug. 17, 2017.
Credit: NASA and ESA

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time generated by the acceleration of massive cosmic objects. These ripples move at the speed of light, but they're much more penetrating; they don't get scattered or absorbed the way light does.

Albert Einstein first predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his theory of general relativity, which was published in 1916. But it took a century for astronomers to detect them directly. That milestone came in September 2015, when LIGO saw gravitational waves emitted by two merging black holes.

That initial find won three project co-founders the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. The LIGO team soon followed it up with three other discoveries, all of which also traced back to colliding black holes.

The fifth gravitational-wave detection — which was announced today (Oct. 16) at news conferences around the world, and in a raft of papers in multiple scientific journals — is something altogether new. On Aug. 17, 2017, LIGO's two detectors, which are located in Louisiana and Washington state, picked up a signal that lasted about 100 seconds — far longer than the fraction-of-a-second "chirps" spawned by merging black holes.


University of Sydney associate professor Tara Murphy talks about hearing about the gravitational waves detection of the neutron star merger and springing into action to plan observations with the CSIRO Telescope in Australia.
Credit: University of Sydney

"It immediately appeared to us the source was likely to be neutron stars, the other coveted source we were hoping to see — and promising the world we would see," David Shoemaker, a spokesman for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a statement.

Indeed, calculations by the LIGO team suggest that each of the colliding objects harbors between 1.1 and 1.6 times the mass of the sun, putting both objects in neutron-star territory in terms of mass. (Each of the merging black holes responsible for the other detected signals contained dozens of solar masses.)

Neutron stars, the collapsed remnants of massive stars that have died in supernova explosions, are some of the most exotic objects in the universe.

"They are as close as you can get to a black hole without actually being a black hole," theoretical astrophysicist Tony Piro, of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, California, said in a different statement. "Just one teaspoon of a neutron star weighs as much as all the people on Earth combined."

aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA3MC84NzkvaTAyL25ldXRyb24tc3Rhci1tZXJnZXItbGlnaHQtc291cmNlLmpwZz8xNTA4MTM1MDY5

Right: An image taken on Aug. 17, 2017, with the Swope Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile shows the light source generated by a neutron-star merger in the galaxy NGC 4993. Left: In this photo taken on April 28, 2017, with the Hubble Space Telescope, the neutron star merger has not occurred and the light source, known as SSS17a, is not visible.
Credit: D.A. Coulter, et al.

The Virgo gravitational-wave detector near Pisa, Italy, also picked up a signal from the Aug. 17 event, which was dubbed GW170817 (for the date of its occurrence). And NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope spotted a burst of gamma-rays — the highest-energy form of light — at about the same time, coming from the same general location.

All of this information allowed researchers to trace the signal's source to a small patch of the southern sky. Discovery team members passed this information on to colleagues around the world, asking them to search that patch with ground- and space-based telescopes.

This teamwork soon bore fruit. Just hours after the gravitational-wave detection, Piro and his colleagues spotted a matching optical light source about 130 million light-years from Earth, using a telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

"We saw a bright-blue source of light in a nearby galaxy — the first time the glowing debris from a neutron star merger had ever been observed," team member Josh Simon, also of the Carnegie Observatories, said in a statement. "It was definitely a thrilling moment."


100 Million light years away! In comparison, the black hole mergers from previous gravitational wave detections were at least a billion light years away. Chad Hanna, assistant professor of physics and of astronomy & astrophysics and Freed Early Career Professor at Penn State explains.
Credit: PSU

Then, about an hour later, researchers using the Gemini South telescope, also in Chile, spotted that same source in infrared light. Other teams using a variety of instruments soon studied the source across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to X-ray wavelengths.

This work revealed that some of the observed light was the radioactive glow of heavy elements such as gold and uranium, which were produced when the two neutron stars collided.

That's a big deal. Scientists already knew the provenance of lighter elements — most hydrogen and helium was generated during the Big Bang, and other elements all the way up to iron are created by nuclear fusion processes inside stars — but the origin of the heavy stuff was not well understood.

"We've shown that the heaviest elements in the periodic table, whose origin was shrouded in mystery until today, are made in the mergers of neutron stars," Edo Berger, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in a statement. Berger leads a team that studied the event using the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

"Each merger can produce more than an Earth's mass of precious metals like gold and platinum and many of the rare elements found in our cellphones," Berger said in a statement.

Indeed, GW170817 likely produced about 10 Earth masses' worth of gold and uranium, researchers said.


Chad Hanna, assistant professor of physics and of astronomy & astrophysics and Freed Early Career Professor at Penn State explains.
Credit: PSU

The in-depth investigation of GW170817 has revealed other important insights.

For example, this work demonstrated that gravitational waves do indeed move at the speed of light, as theory predicts. (The Fermi space telescope detected the gamma-ray burst just 2 seconds after the gravitational-wave signal ended.) And astronomers now know a little more about neutron stars.

"There are some types of things that neutron stars could be made of that we're sure they're not made of, because they didn't squish that much" during the merger, O'Shaughnessy said.

But GW170817 is just the beginning. For instance, such "multimessenger" observations provide another way to calibrate distances to celestial objects, said the CfA's Avi Loeb, who also chairs Harvard University's astronomy department.

Such measurements could, in theory, help scientists finally nail down the rate of the universe's expansion. Estimates of this value, known as the Hubble Constant, vary depending on whether they were calculated using observations of supernova explosions or the cosmic microwave background (the ancient light left over from the Big Bang), said Loeb, who was not involved in the newly announced discovery.

"Here's another path that is open that was not available before," he told Space.com.


Bangalore Sathyaprakash, Elsbach Professor of Physics and Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State explains.
Credit: PSU

Many other such paths are likely to open, O'Shaughnessy stressed, and where they may lead is anyone's guess.

"I think probably the most exciting thing of all is really that it's the beginning," O'Shaughnessy said of the new discovery. "It resets the board for what astronomy is going to look like in the years to come, now that we have multiple ways of simultaneously probing a transient and violent universe."


The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured imagery of the source of the gravitational waves detection. Learn more about it from the Hubblecast video series.
Credit: ESA/Hubble


Several European Southern Telescopes were used to discover the "kilonova," the merging of the neutron stars.
Credit: ESO


The Chandra team explains the first x-ray detection GW170817 in this tour of the region.
Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart


UC Berkeley theoretical astrophysicist Daniel Kasen describes how the neutron star collision was discovered and what its debris is comprised of.
Credit: Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally
 
I hope in my lifetime I am able to witness a Super Nova in our galaxy but within a safe distance.
Betelgeuse
has is close to end of life, Not sure if we will witness the supernova. That star is 650 million light years away. The event might have already taken place, it will take 650 years for us to see it
 
This is of course cool as fuck. The sound is amazing as well. It will be great to see what comes of this new way of observing our universe especially after seeing so many shit on it as ~useless.

For reasons I don't fully understand I made the mistake of poking around the looney bin on the subject:

Regardless of which creationist cosmology you like, the gravity waves observed in September 2015 must have left their source very soon after Creation week
 
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Thankfully not these neutron stars and hopefully not Betelgeuse will hit us with their gamma-ray burst
 
And to think, in a mere 0.5-500 billion years, a good portion of the freshly created matter from this 130 million year old kilonova event could very well form the planets of multiple new planetary systems around other stars within galaxy NGC4993.
 
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