Scientists have the receipts of two stellar bodies merging and causing a violent explosion in deep space.
World’s Largest Radio Telescope, Astronomers presented us with a mysterious video: footage decked with lime green smudges steadily evolving on a dark background. But right at the center of this recording, one smudge isn’t like the others. It’s the brightest neon blob of all, and it enhances with each frame. What you’re seeing is proof that some 20 billion years ago an ultrapowerful neutron star collided with a weaker star, spitting out an explosive, short-lived gamma ray burst, rippling gravitational waves across the cosmos and diffusing surrounding space with a potent afterglow. It was a shattering merger that occurred when the universe was at just 40% its current age, and our remarkable view of its incident is courtesy of the world’s largest radio telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array situated in Chile.
More specifically, ALMA is a combination of 66 radio telescopes spread out across the high-altitude Chilean Andes. And they work together to bring us data about our universe’s violent side. “Afterglows for short bursts are very difficult to come by, so it was spectacular to catch this event shining so brightly,” Wen-fai Fong, an astronomer at Northwestern University and principal investigator of the ALMA program, said in a statement. “This surprising discovery opens up a new area of study, as it motivates us to observe many more of these with ALMA and other telescope arrays in the future.” Details of Fong and fellow researchers’ findings are soon to be published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. For now, a preprint is available to view on arXiv.
Source: This news is originally published by cnet