A team of researchers from the LIGO detector has identified one of the largest and most violent phenomena in the cosmos. Is about the biggest collision of neutron stars recorded so far.
LEAGUE, which can capture very small gravitational disturbances, detected a deformation in spacetime on April 25. According to report The country, two of its lasers moved less than one thousandth the size of a proton.
For months, astrophysicists analyzed the information and concluded that the crash of neutron stars happened at a distance of 500 million light years from Earth, details a study that will be published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Towards the end of his life, when the stars finish their nuclear fuel, the star collapses on itself in a supernova and it becomes a neutron star. It loses its volume to the point that it is only reduced to a sphere of 100 kilometers, but with a mass greater than that of the Sun.
According to the researchers, the neutron stars of the binary system they had an approximate mass of 1.5 and 1.7 times that of the Sun. After the collision, a black hole with more than three solar masses must have formed, says Alicia Sintes, principal investigator of the LIGO group.
Gravitational waves occur when an object or more interact with each other and produce disturbances in space time. These waves expand at the speed of light in all directions. Some of them are detected by instruments such as LIGO, which can interpret the characteristics of the phenomenon that produced the astronomical event.
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