The collision — known as a “kilonova” — occurred in a galaxy around 140 million light-years away. The ball of optical, ultra-violet and infrared light has since been intensely observed by astrophysicists at the University of Copenhagen.in the journal Nature provides details from an in-depth study of the 2017 celestial event, the first kilonova ever observed by astronomers using ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.
“I was quite surprised by how simple the story hiding behind the curtain of complexity in the data,” Sneppen continued. “You have this immensely complex physics, unimaginable dense stars and the birth of a black hole — and then it all reduces to this beautiful sphere.” The neutron stars that crashed into each other are “dense and compact,” Sneppen said. They only measured around 20 km in diameter — about 12 miles — but they are “heavier than the sun,” he said. “A teaspoon of neutron star matter weighs more than Mount Everest.”
Sneppen said the sphere after the collision started out “from a size much smaller than the Earth, but [expanded] at a fraction of the speed of light.” It grew to a size “hundreds of million times larger in surface area than the sun itself.”It took the team of experts years to understand the data produced by the 2017 kilonova, which Sneppen said changed in color, beginning with “very blue tones” but transitioning into"progressively redder colors as the days passed.
“We looked at a range of colors for this analysis, from the ultraviolet, over the visible colors your eye can see , to the infrared colors,” Sneppen said.
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