What Actually Happens When Two Neutron Stars Collide

When two dead stars collide, the universe forges gold. This is the complete story of what actually happens when two neutron stars merge, from the long, silent spiral driven by ripples in spacetime, to the thousandth-of-a-second collision hotter than anything else in the cosmos, to the violent birth of the heaviest elements in existence. Each of these stars is barely the width of a city, yet heavier than our sun, and so dense that a single sugar-cube of their material would outweigh a mountain. For hundreds of millions of years they fall toward each other, until in their final moments they whirl around hundreds of times a second at nearly a third of the speed of light, and then they touch. What follows shakes the fabric of space, forges gold and platinum and uranium in seconds, and lights up a glow that telescopes on Earth scramble to catch. In this deep dive we explore how neutron stars are born from dying giants, how gravitational waves slowly doom their orbits, the extreme physics of the merger itself, billion-degree temperatures, matter crushed beyond the atomic nucleus, and magnetic fields wound to titanic strength, and how the rapid neutron-capture process builds the heavy half of the periodic table. We also unpack the landmark detection of August 2017, the night gravitational waves and light arrived together and changed astronomy forever, and what each collision teaches us about the ultimate limits of matter. We’re now live on Spotify 🎧 https://open.spotify.com/show/033Dogu... Sources and Further Reading: Abbott, B.P. et al. (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration). (2017). "GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral." Physical Review Letters, 119(16), 161101. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.1... NASA — Neutron Stars and GW170817 Multi-Messenger Observations. https://science.nasa.gov/universe/neu... Hulse, R.A. & Taylor, J.H. (1975). "Discovery of a pulsar in a binary system." The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 195, L51–L53. https://doi.org/10.1086/181708 European Southern Observatory (ESO) — Kilonova Observations and R-Process Heavy-Element Production in NGC 4993. https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1733/ Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) — Neutron Star Mergers and Gravitational-Wave Science. https://www.aei.mpg.de #NeutronStars #Kilonova #GravitationalWaves #Astrophysics #SpaceScience #Cosmology #GW170817