Colliding neutron stars shot a light-speed jet through space
An emerging consensus suggests the crash can explain distant gamma-ray bursts
BY LISA GROSSMAN 11:53AM, FEBRUARY 22, 2019
When a pair of ultradense cores of dead stars smashed into one another, the collision shot a bright jet of charged subatomic particles through space.
Astronomers thought no such jet had made it out of the wreckage of the neutron star crash, first detected in August 2017. But new observations of the crash site using a network of radio telescopes from around the world show that a high-speed stream of particles did escape from the debris, researchers report online February 21 in Science.
The work is part of an emerging consensus among scientists that the merger actually produced a jet, and could shed light on the origins of mysterious flashes of high-energy light called short gamma-ray bursts.
According to theory, a pair of crashing neutron stars should merge into another dense object, possibly a black hole. In the process, a combination of extreme energies and magnetic fields could launch a bright jet of electrons and protons moving close to the speed of light. Researchers think that such jets are seen from afar as short gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs. But no one has ever directly observed a neutron star collision producing the bursts.
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