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BBC NEWS/STELIOS THOUKIDIDES The neutron star collision is an opportunity to see what’s inside these incredible objects. For the first time, astronomers are able to detect colliding dead
For the first time, astronomers are able to detect colliding dead suns known as neutron stars, thanks to a powerful new telescope.
this neutron star collisions They are the key to our understanding of the universe.
They are believed to have created the heavy metals that formerly formed stars and planets like ours. billions of years.
The light from the shocks is only visible for a few nights, so the telescope must race to find them.
Astronomers observed such a collision in 2017, but found it largely by chance.
The UK-built Transient Optical Gravitational-Wave Observer (GOTO) is now located above the clouds on the Spanish volcanic island of La Palma. Heawill systematically seek.
Professor Danny Steeghs of the University of Warwick told me in La Palma, “When a really good fix comes in, everybody gets to work to get the most out of it.”
“Speed is key. “We’re looking for something very short lived, very little time before they fade,” he said.
Neutron stars are so heavy that a small teaspoon of their material weight 4,000 millions of tons.
The telescope allows astronomers to open one to see what’s inside.
To get a clear view of the sky, the telescope is placed on top of a mountain, home to a dozen instruments of all shapes and sizes, each studying different phenomena.
When their twin domes open, they reveal two pitch-black batteries of eight cylindrical telescopes bolted together, structures more like menacing rocket launchers.
Each battery covers every bit of the sky above it, spinning rapidly vertically and horizontally.
A neutron star is a dead sun that collapses under its immense weight and shatters the atoms that once made it shine.
They have gravity strong enough to pull each other. sometimes collide and merge.
When this happens, they create a flash of light and a powerful shock wave ripples through the universe. This causes everything in the universe to shake imperceptibly, including the atoms inside each of us.
The shock wave, called a gravitational wave, distorts space. Once detected on Earth, the new telescope sets out to locate the flash.
Operators aim to locate it hours or even minutes after gravitational wave detection.
They take pictures of the sky and then digitally remove the stars, planets and galaxies that were there the night before.
Any point of light that wasn’t there before could be colliding neutron stars.
This usually takes days and weeks, but should now be done in real time. It is a huge task performed using software.
“You’d think these explosions were so energetic, so bright, it should be easy,” said astrophysics professor Joe Lyman, “but we have to search for 100 million stars for the only object that interests us.”
“We have to do this very quickly because the object will be gone in two days,” he said.
The team is working with other astronomers to study the collision in more detail.
When they spot the collision, they turn to larger and more powerful telescopes around the world. These show the collision in much more detail and at different wavelengths.
This process “talks to physics at its best,” Lyman said.
The top of the mountain brings astronomers a little closer to the stars. with their telescope a new way to observe the cosmosAccording to GOTO Instrumentation Scientist Kendall Ackley.
Traditional astronomy was all about getting lucky, he said.
“We no longer expect new discoveries. Instead, we were told where to find them and discover, piece by piece, what is in the universe.”
Source: El Nacional
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