Finding more neutron star mergers could help astrohysicists reveal the history of the universe. Via WIRED UK
Forget archaeologists and their lost civilizations, or paleontologists with their fossils—astrophysicist Heloise Stevance studies the past on an entirely different scale. When astronomers catch a glimpse of an unusual signal in the sky, perhaps the light from a star exploding, Stevance takes that signal and rewinds the clock on it by billions of years. Working at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, she traces the past lives of dead and dying stars, a process she calls stellar genealogy.
Researchers don’t know how common these mergers are, and they can’t tell whether they are responsible for creating all the heavy elements in the universe, or just a fraction. But if astrophysicists could observe more of these mergers, they could answer these and even deeper questions—such as how old the universe is. This is where stellar genealogy can help., Stevance and her colleagues used observations of the collision to delve into the neutron stars’ past.
The work also describes interactions between the two stars before they burned out their fuel to become neutron stars. They started tens of millions of kilometers apart, which sounds far but is actually well under the distance between Earth and the Sun. Each star’s exterior was surrounded by gas known as a stellar envelope.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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