Unprecedented detail of the aftermath of a collision between two neutron stars depicted in a 3-D computer model created by a University of Alberta astrophysicist provides a better understanding of how some of the universe's fundamental elements form in cosmic collisions.
"The collision creates
heavy elements including gold and lead," said Rodrigo Fernández, who worked with an international research team using supercomputers at the U.S. National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and data from a collision scientists detected in August of 2017—the first such collision ever observed.
"We also saw for the first time a gamma-ray burst from two
neutron stars colliding. There's a large amount of science coming out of that discovery," he added, including helping researchers calculate the mass of the neutron stars and even confirm how fast the universe is expanding.
Neutron stars are the smallest and densest stars, packing more mass than Earth's sun into an area the size of a city. When two of them collide, they merge in a flash of light and debris known as a kilonova, as material explodes outward.
Until now, computer simulations of the collisions haven't been sophisticated enough to account for where all that material ends up.
