https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neut...onal-waves

my buddy said this was huge important science news. paradigm shifting level 11 sh!t. anyone want to explain why? i didn't read the whole thing at all

Quote:WASHINGTON — Two ultradense cores of dead stars have produced a long-awaited cosmic collision, showering scientists with riches.

The event was the first direct sighting of a smashup of neutron stars, which are formed when aging stars explode and leave behind a neutron-rich remnant. In the wake of the collision, the churning residue forged gold, silver, platinum and a smattering of other heavy elements such as uranium, researchers reported October 16 at a news conference in Washington, D.C. Such elements’ birthplaces were previously unknown, but their origins were revealed by the cataclysm’s afterglow.

“It really is the last missing piece” of the periodic table, says Anna Frebel, an astronomer at MIT who was not involved in the research. “This is heaven for anyone working in the field.” After the collision, about 10 times the Earth’s mass in gold was spewed out into space, some scientists calculated.

Using data gathered by about 70 different observatories, astronomers characterized the event in exquisite detail, releasing a slew of papers describing the results. A tremor of gravitational waves, spotted by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, LIGO, on August 17, provided the first sign of the cataclysm.

Light types
wavelengths of light detected from neutron star merger
ROBERT HURT/IPAC/CALTECH, MANSI KASLIWAL AND GREGG HALLINAN/CALTECH, PHIL EVANS/NASA AND THE GROWTH COLLABORATION

Telescopes picked up the afterglow of two converging neutron stars in a variety of wavelengths of light, from ultraviolet (left, image from NASA’s Swift satellite) to infrared (middle, image from the Gemini South telescope) to radio waves (right, image from the Very Large Array).

“Already it is transforming our understanding of the universe, with a fresh narrative of the physics of stars in their death throes,” said France Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, which funds LIGO.

A sequence of various types of electromagnetic radiation followed that gravitational trill, like musical instruments taking turns in a symphony. A burst of gamma rays segued into a glow of visible and infrared light, first spotted about 12 hours after the smashup. More than a week later, as those wavelengths faded away, X-rays crescendoed, followed by radio waves.

Combining gravitational waves with light from a neutron star merger is a long-held dream of astrophysicists. “The picture that you can put together by having all of those sources is synergistic,” says LIGO spokesperson David Shoemaker of MIT. “You can make inferences that otherwise would be impossible."

That detailed picture revealed the inner workings of neutron star collisions and the source of brief blasts of high-energy light called short gamma-ray bursts. Researchers also calculated how fast the universe is expanding and tested the properties of the odd material within neutron stars.

For astrophysicists, “this event is the Rosetta stone,” says LIGO member Richard O’Shaughnessy of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

LIGO’s two detectors, located in the United States, registered an unmistakable sign of the upheaval: A shimmying of space itself that continued for about 100 seconds before cutting off. It was the strongest and longest series of spacetime ripples LIGO had ever seen. At that point, scientists knew they had something big, says LIGO member Vicky Kalogera of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “The e-mails that were circulated said, ‘Oh my God, this is it.’”