Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy | 2019 Feb 21
A global network of radio telescopes exposes the aftermath of a violent merger of neutron stars
An international research team including astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, has combined radio telescopes from five continents to prove the existence of a narrow stream of material, a so-called jet, emerging from the only gravitational wave event involving two neutron stars observed so far. With its high sensitivity and excellent performance, the 100-m radio telescope in Effelsberg played an important role in the observations. ...
In August 2017, two neutron stars were observed colliding, producing gravitational waves that were detected by the American LIGO and European Virgo detectors. Neutron stars are ultra-dense stars, roughly the same mass as the Sun, but similar in size to a city like Cologne. This event is the first and only one of this type that has been observed so far, and it happened in a galaxy 130 million light years away from Earth, in the constellation of Hydra.
Astronomers observed the event and the subsequent evolution across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma-rays, X-rays to visible light and radio waves. Two hundred days after the merger, observations combining radio telescopes in Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and North America proved the existence of a jet emerging from this violent collision. These findings are now published in the scientific journal Science by an international team of astronomers, led by Giancarlo Ghirlanda from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). ...
Compact Radio Emission Indicates a Structured Jet Was Produced by a Binary Neutron Star Merger ~ G. Ghirlanda et al
- Science (online 21 Feb 2019) DOI: 10.1126/science.aau8815
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1808.00469 > 01 Aug 2018