【Step Sister Ki Havash (2023) Hindi Short Film】

In a landmark moment for astronomy and Step Sister Ki Havash (2023) Hindi Short Filmphysics that helps explain the origin of the ring on your finger and key components in your cell phone, scientists announced they have, for the first time, detected the collision of two neutron stars.

This collision -- as reported by more than 1,000 scientists in multiple studies published in the journals Scienceand Nature -- explains the origin of gold and other heavy metals. These include silver, platinum, and lead, among others.

"It is remarkable to imagine that the material of this [wedding] band was made in a collision of two neutron stars, each having the size of a city and the mass of the sun," theoretical physicist Avi Loeb said via email.

SEE ALSO: 2017 Nobel Prize goes to scientists who detected ripples in the fabric of space and time

To understand this discovery, one has to think back to billions of years before the Earth was formed.

When the universe was still young, two huge stars formed millions of light-years from the part of space that would eventually become Earth's home.

Those two stars lived their lives in harmony, until both ran out of stellar fuel and exploded as supernovas, the extreme death blasts reserved for the most massive stars.

Each star left behind a densely-packed remnant of itself: a neutron star with 1.1 to 1.6 times the mass of the sun packed into a diameter about the size of Boston. And one day, these two stellar remnants collided, triggering an explosion called a kilonova that created billions of tons of gold, platinum, lead, and other heavy elements.

No evidence, until now

Scientists have long-suspected that this is how these heavy, precious elements formed, but they haven't had any tangible evidence of it until now.

"It's the first time we have direct evidence for how the heaviest elements on the periodic table actually form," astrophysicist Edo Berger, who led the team that made the heavy element discovery, said in an interview.

"It's something that's been debated for at least the last four or five decades, going back and forth in arguments among theorists, but with absolutely no data to guide this whole question," he added.

"And in this event, we see the fingerprints of formation of heavy elements that completes the story of how the periodic table formed."

Observing these two neutron stars slamming into one another utilized cutting-edge tools in scientists' growing arsenal. Incredibly, researchers were able to both hear and see the results of the neutron star collision.

On August 17, the twin LIGO detectors in Louisiana and Washington along with Virgo in Italy felt the subtle stretch and contraction of the fabric of space and time consistent with a gravitational wave passing through our part of space. The ripples moved through each of us, but no one on Earth knew it.

Just after LIGO and Virgo felt those gravitational waves, scientists began the mad scramble to try to figure out where in the sky they came from and what made them.

A team effort

Nearly every large telescope on Earth, and some in space, were used to try to find the neutron stars that collided and sent those shock waves out through the universe, Berger said.

A team using the Swift satellite, which is designed to detect gamma ray bursts – some of the most extreme explosions in the known universe – started hunting for the signal about 16 minutes after LIGO felt it. This search was prompted by an automated text message sent from LIGO.

"Essentially, we got a text message from LIGO saying that this object had been detected. We got Swift starting to look for the counterpart 16 minutes after the text message was received," Jamie Kennea, head of Swift's science operations based at Pennsylvania State University, said in an interview.

"Our turnaround here was very quick. However, at that point, we were searching this very large region of the sky, so we didn't actually get to look at the region of the sky that contained this counterpart until about just over half a day after the LIGO detection," he said.

Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

The Fermi satellite detected a gamma-ray burst that was likely associated with the neutron star collision. The Chandra X-ray Observatory also got in on the action, observing the aftermath of the merger.

"This combination of light and gravitational waves is brand new and very exciting"

Numerous ground-based telescopes also made observations to confirm that there was, in fact, a light signature associated with the gravitational waves. So scientists were able to visually confirm a change consistent with what LIGO had detected.

While LIGO and Virgo had detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes in the past, there had never been a light signature associated with those observations.

By actually being able to observe the light of two colliding objects out in space while also parsing through the gravitational wave data provided by these sensitive detectors, scientists were able to learn far more about the collision -- and the objects that collided -- than ever before.

“This combination of light and gravitational waves is brand new and very exciting -- we’ve never had this kind of observation before,” LIGO astrophysicist Vicky Kalogera said in a statement.

“With the gravitational-wave signals from three detectors, two in the U.S. and one in Italy, we were able to tell our electromagnetic colleagues, working across the electromagnetic spectrum, where in the sky to point their telescopes to find the pair of neutron stars.”

All that glitters is gold

That combination of gravitational wave data and the more conventional telescopic observations allowed Berger and his team to figure out that the collision created the heavy elements so familiar to us on Earth.

The team of scientists looked at the data and the spectrum of light emitted by the merger and determined that it matches the spectrum and intensity that should be created by these unstable, radioactive elements just after they form.

"The theoretical idea that neutron star binary mergers lead to the formation of these heavy elements has been around for a long time," Berger said. "The idea was that in that collision between the two neutron stars, some of the material from the neutron star crust is going to get ejected out at very high speed and this material has, by definition, has a lot of neutrons."

"So it's kind of an ideal place for the formation of these heavy elements because the nuclei of these elements are predominantly neutrons; they're more neutrons than protons."

In total, they found that the neutron star collision produced more than 10,000 times the mass of the Earth in heavy metals, with about 10 times Earth's mass of that in gold alone.

That may sound like a lot, but these events are still relatively infrequent, according to Berger, so these metals are pretty rare throughout the universe.

Those atoms are now moving through the universe to settle where they may, just as the gold and platinum atoms now on Earth condensed from the ring of debris orbiting the sun, helping form our nascent planet more than 4 billion years ago.

According to Berger, this discovery effectively confirms that neutron star mergers are responsible for seeding our universe with gold, silver, platinum, and other elements that we use in our phones and jewelry today.

While supernova explosions may form some heavy elements, they are in lower quantities than other lighter elements that are formed in great amounts during these explosions, Berger said.

"Whenever I look at my gold-plated wedding band, I now get reminded of this LIGO event"

It's also possible that some other kind of collision or exotic event is also responsible for creating the heavy elements we see on Earth and out in the universe today. We just haven't figured it out yet.

"Just as with the first LIGO event of black hole mergers, this is something that our community of astrophysics should be proud about," Loeb, who is not an author of the new studies about the neutron star merger, said via email. The detection of gravitational waves using LIGO, which first occurred in 2015, earned the Nobel Prize in Physics this year.

"We predicted what was eventually observed," Loeb said. "This gives us confidence that we understand what we are talking about."

While this most recent discovery is a huge first in a number of ways, it's not as if the book is closed on gravitational wave science.

Researchers are still hoping to see more of these neutron star collisions to figure out exactly what else might be going on with these extreme explosions and their aftermath.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

For instance, it's still unclear exactly what these neutron stars become after they merge.

"That post-merger remnant, it could be a gigantic super-neutron star, in which case it very likely would be the heaviest neutron star we've ever seen, or it could have collapsed to a black hole, in which case it would be the lightest black hole we've ever seen," LIGO astrophysicist Shane Larson, of Northwestern University, said in an interview.

"We just don't know enough from this event to be able to tell."

This is still one of those discoveries that makes a person stop and marvel at the universe. It's rare that a piece of research, particularly in space science, makes you stop and look at the world differently, but this one does.

Atoms that make up your watch, jewelry, and phone were all formed when two super massive stars slammed into one another, and we never would have known about it were it not for LIGO and the thousands of scientists keeping an eye out for it.

---

Featured Video For You

---

Why NASA doesn't have enough money

---