GW170817 NASA
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have made what they described as a unique measurement that indicates a jet, plowing through space at speeds greater than 99.97% the speed of light, was propelled by the titanic collision between two neutron stars.
So, even with all of the hullabaloo over the new Webb Space Telescope and all that it can do, the 30 year old Hubble Telescope shows that it can continue to astound us as well.
The explosive event, named GW170817, was observed in August 2017. The blast released the energy comparable to that of a supernova explosion. It was the first combined detection of gravitational waves and gamma radiation from a binary neutron star merger.
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NASA explains neutron stars are the “trash-compacted” surviving cores of massive stars that exploded. Weighing more than our Sun, they would fit inside New York City. At this unimaginable density, one teaspoon of surface material would weigh at least 4 billion tons on Earth.
NASA called this a major watershed in the ongoing investigation of these extraordinary collisions. The aftermath of this merger was collectively seen by 70 observatories around the globe and in space, across a broad swath of the electromagnetic spectrum in addition to the gravitational wave detection. This heralded a significant breakthrough for the emerging field of Time Domain and Multi-Messenger Astrophysics, the use of multiple “messengers” like light and gravitational waves to study the universe as it changes over time.
Scientists quickly aimed Hubble at the site of the explosion just two days later. The neutron stars collapsed into a black hole whose powerful gravity began pulling material toward it. That material formed a rapidly-spinning disk that generated jets moving outward from its poles. The roaring jet smashed into and swept up material in the expanding shell of explosion debris. This included a blob of material through which a jet emerged.
While the event took place in 2017, it has taken several years for scientists to come up with a way to analyze the Hubble data and data from other telescopes to paint this full picture.
The Hubble observation was combined with observations from multiple National Science Foundation radio telescopes working together for very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). The radio data were taken 75 days and 230 days after the explosion.
“I’m amazed that Hubble could give us such a precise measurement, which rivals the precision achieved by powerful radio VLBI telescopes spread across the globe,” said Kunal P. Mooley of Caltech in Pasadena, California, lead author of a paper being published in the October 13 journal of Nature magazine.
