Neutron star: New telescope detects dead sun colliding
Astronomers have for the first time been able to detect collisions with dead suns known as neutron stars, thanks to a powerful new telescope.
Neutron star collisions are key to our understanding of the Universe.
They are thought to have created the heavy metals that formed the stars and planets like us billions of years ago.
The light from the collision was only visible for a few nights so telescopes had to race to find it.
Astronomers observed one of these collisions in 2017, but most found it by luck.
The British Gravity Wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO), located above the clouds on the Spanish volcanic island of La Palma will now systematically hunt them down.
“When the really good detection comes along, everything has to be done to the max,” Prof Danny Steeghs, from the University of Warwick, told me in La Palma.
“Speed is of the essence. We are looking for something short-lived – not much time before they disappear”.
Neutron stars are so heavy that a tiny teaspoon of their material weighs four billion tons.
The telescope allows astronomers to effectively open one up to see what’s inside.
In order to see the sky clearly, the telescope is located on top of a mountain, home to a dozen instruments of all shapes and sizes, each studying a different phenomenon.
When the twin domes open, they reveal two jet-black batteries of eight cylindrical telescopes fused together – a structure that looks more like a menacing rocket launcher. Each battery covers every swath of the sky above it by rotating rapidly vertically and horizontally
A neutron star is a dead sun that has collapsed under its immense weight, destroying the atoms that once made it shine. They have a strong gravity so they are attracted to each other. Eventually they fell together and merged.
When that happens, they create flashes of light and powerful shockwaves ripple throughout the Universe. It makes everything in the Universe wobble, including, imperceptibly, the atoms within each of us.
Shock waves, called gravitational waves, distort space. When detected on Earth, the new telescope jumps into action to find the exact location of the flash.
Operators aim to find it within hours, or even minutes of gravitational wave detection. They took photos of the sky and then digitally erased the stars, planets and galaxies that were there the night before. Every point of light that didn’t exist before might be a colliding neutron star.
This would normally take days and weeks, but now it has to be done in real time. This is a huge task, done using computer software.
“You would think that this explosion was so energetic, so luminous, it should be easy,” said astrophysics professor Dr Joe Lyman. “But we had to search through a hundred million stars for the one object we were interested in.
“We have to do this very quickly because the object will be gone in two days.”
The team is working with other astronomers to study the collision in more detail.
Once they determine the collision, they turn to larger and more powerful telescopes around the world. It investigates collisions in more detail, and at different wavelengths.
This process “tells us about physics to the extreme,” explains Dr Lyman.
The top of the mountain brings astronomers a little closer to the stars. With their telescopes they have a new way to peer into the cosmos, said GOTO instrumentation scientist Dr Kendall Ackley.
Traditional astronomy is all about luck, he said. “Now we no longer expect new discoveries. Instead, we are told where to find them, and uncover, piece by piece what is in the universe.”
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