Star merger ripples across space
David Reitze, Executive Director of the LIGO Laboratory at Caltech in Pasadena, California, said “Scientists have detected the warping of space generated by the collision of two dead stars or neutron stars. This the one we’ve all been waiting for.”
They have confirmed that such mergers lead to the production of the gold and platinum that exists in the Universe and the measurement of the gravitational waves given off by this cataclysmic event was made on 17th August by the LIGO-VIRGO Collaboration. This discovery enabled telescopes all over the world to capture details of the merger as it unfolded.
The outburst took place in a galaxy called NGC 4993 located roughly a thousand billion, billion km away in the Constellation Hydra. It happened 130 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It was so far way that the light and gravitational waves have only just reached us. The stars themselves had masses 10-12 per cent greater than our Sun- but they were no larger than 30km across. They were the crushed leftover cores of massive stars that long ago exploded as supernovas.
They are called neutron stars because the process of crushing the star makes the charged protons and electrons in the atoms of the star combine – to form an object made entirely of neutrons, which a teaspoonful would weigh a billion tonnes.
Gravitational waves are a prediction of the Theory of General Relativity. They are ripples in the fabric of space-time generated by violent events and accelerating masses will produce waves that propagate at the speed of light.