- Pallab Ghosh
- Science Correspondent, BBC News
8 hours
image source, BBC News/Stelios Thoukidides
The neutron star collision is an opportunity to see what is inside these incredible objects.
Astronomers can detect colliding dead suns known as neutron stars for the first time thanks to a powerful new telescope.
Las neutron star collisions They are key to our understanding of the universe.
They are believed to have created heavy metals that formed stars and planets like ours ago. billions of years.
The light from the shocks is only visible for a couple of nights, so the telescope must race to locate them.
Astronomers observed one such collision in 2017, but they found it largely by chance.
The UK-built Transient Optical Gravitational-Wave Observer (GOTO) located above the clouds on the volcanic Spanish island of La Palma, now las will systematically search.
“When a really good detection comes along, everyone gets down to business to make the most of it,” Professor Danny Steeghs from the University of Warwick told me on La Palma.
“Speed is of the essence. We’re looking for something very short-lived, there’s not much time before they fade,” he added.
Neutron stars are so heavy that a small teaspoon of their material pesa 4.000 millions of tons.
The telescope allows astronomers to crack one of them open to see what’s inside.
image source, BBC News/Kevin Church
The new telescope looks like a battery of rocket launchers.
In order to get a clear view of the sky, the telescope is situated on top of a mountain, home to a dozen instruments of all shapes and sizes, each studying different phenomena.
When their twin domes open, they reveal two jet-black batteries of eight cylindrical telescopes bolted together, structures that look more like menacing rocket launchers.
Each battery covers every patch of sky above it, spinning rapidly vertically and horizontally.
Find the exact location
A neutron star is a dead sun that collapsed under its immense weight, crushing the atoms that once made it shine.
They have such strong gravity that they attract each other. Sometime collide and merge.
When that happens, they create a flash of light and a powerful shock wave ripples through the universe. This causes everything in the universe to wobble, including, imperceptibly, the atoms within each of us.
The shock wave, called a gravitational wave, distorts space. When detected on Earth, the new telescope springs into action to find the exact location of the flash.
image source, BBC News/Stelios Thoukidides
Neutron stars are suns that have collapsed under the weight of their own gravity, crushing the atoms that once made them shine.
Operators aim to locate it within hours, or even minutes following gravitational wave detection.
They take pictures of the sky and then digitally remove the stars, planets, and galaxies that were there the night before.
Any spots of light that weren’t there before may be colliding neutron stars.
This usually takes days and weeks, but now it must be done in real time. It is a huge task that is carried out using software.
“You would think these bursts are very energetic, very luminous, it should be easy,” said astrophysics professor Joe Lyman, “but we have to search through 100 million stars for the one object that interests us.”
“We have to do this very quickly because the object will be gone in two days,” he said.
discover the universe
image source, BBC News/Kevin Church
The team is working with other astronomers to study the collision in greater detail.
The team is working with other astronomers to study the collision in greater detail.
Once they identify the collision, they turn to larger and more powerful telescopes around the world. These show the collision in much more detail and at different wavelengths.
This process “speaks of physics at its finest,” Lyman said.
The top of the mountain brings astronomers a little closer to the stars. With the telescope they have a new way of observing the cosmosaccording to GOTO Instrumentation Scientist Kendall Ackley.
Traditional astronomy was regarding getting lucky, he said.
“Now we no longer wait for new discoveries. Instead, we are told where to find them and discover, piece by piece, what is in the universe,” he concluded.
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