Doomed Neutron Stars Create Blast of Light and Gravitational Waves

Doomed neutron stars whirl toward their demise in this animation. Gravitational waves (pale arcs) bleed away orbital energy, causing the stars to move closer together and merge. As the stars collide, some of the debris blasts away in particle jets moving at nearly the speed of light, producing a brief burst of gamma rays (magenta). In addition to the ultra-fast jets powering the gamma-rays, the merger also generates slower moving debris. An outflow driven by accretion onto the merger remnant emits rapidly fading ultraviolet light (violet). A dense cloud of hot debris stripped from the neutron stars just before the collision produces visible and infrared light (blue-white through red). The UV, optical and near-infrared glow is collectively referred to as a kilonova. Later, once the remnants of the jet directed toward us had expanded into our line of sight, X-rays (blue) were detected. This animation represents phenomena observed up to nine days after GW170817.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

Music: “Exploding Skies” from Killer Tracks

Follow NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

[RizwanKhan_]

A brave cameraman out there in indeed.

[TheFallofTheEleventh]

This my son, is how gingers are born....

[thomas]

I love science so much, it's mesmerising.

[PaaulG]

Would be much better with Hans Zimmer interstellar soundtrack for sure.

[kacperb]

Imagine if NASA had the Military budget... the things they could do!

[ruy_u]

and there is that guy
who still believes that the earth is flat

[radar]

This is really cool. I wish it had some type of 1 second=X years indicator to showcase the sped up timeframe.

[iamnotevenanumber]

Wow! I am especially amazed by the great soundtrack that the collision made!

[erncogamer]

Have we entered a new era? An era of light and gravitational waves... An era of neutrons stars. Something we can now see that we couldn't detect before

[harrylamont]

Jimmy is not going to be happy about this

[nickyemm]

Slow the settings down to 0.5 or 0.25 looks cool !

[mariateresa]

è una bellissima ripresa ... grazie di questa connessione con l'infinito.

[alexanderreinders]

Congratulations to NASA ESA ESO LIGO VIRGO VLT INTEGRAL TEAMS for this outstanding breakthrough 👍🎉🥇

[nicex]

*is there anything more beautiful in the world than this?*

[hassanelhaddad]

By looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, the scientists are in fact learning something about fundamental physics.

[MMphotography]

@Nasa Goddard, Does it mean we have entered a new era of astronomy ??

[Greenpoloboy]

amazing sounds from space . just like a song

[kwdkwon]

It’s pretty cool we got a talk from the people who detected it a week before

[tim]

If the colliding objects were two black holes typical of the collisions we observe with LIGO, would there be anything emitted other than gravitational waves? How far away would you have to be to survive the collision, and what would kill you if you were a bit closer than that?

[lettonster]

the alien ship I went on had stuff like this to keep humans entertained.