Space telescope used to monitor event 1bn light years away that sheds light on how unusual elements are formed
Astronomers have witnessed the creation of rare heavy elements in the aftermath of a violent collision between two neutron stars that were booted out of their home galaxy about 1bn light years away.
“For the first time we have evidence of these particular kinds of elements being formed in these mergers,” said Andrew Levan, professor of astrophysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Neutron stars are incredibly dense and compact objects, as massive as the sun but as small as a city. Astronomers were alerted to the potential neutron-star collision in March when they detected an intense burst of gamma rays from deep space, the second brightest recorded in the past 50 years.
An image taken by the James Webb space telescope showing the distance between the site of the stars’ collision and the galaxy they came from.Over a period of days, the light from the collision changed from blue to red, a hallmark of a kilonova. The neutron stars appeared to have been kicked out of a bright galaxy spotted nearby before merging 120,000 light years away – the width of the Milky Way – several hundred million years later.
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