An unusual cosmic ray has just appeared before Earth-based observatories, helping scientists trace clues about the “mutual annihilation” of two extremely fearsome objects in the universe.
According to Reuters, what the Earth-based observatories have just recorded is a high-energy explosion from an ancient galaxy, located about 3 billion light-years away from us.
This is an immense distance, as one light-year corresponds to approximately 9.5 trillion kilometers, which light takes a year to reach Earth. This indicates that the gamma ray we detected must be extraordinarily powerful and emitted from something truly terrifying.
Graphic illustration of intense gamma rays from the collision of two neutron stars near a black hole – (Image: NSF’s NOIRLab/REUTERS)
A team of scientists led by astronomers Andrew Levan from Radboud University (Netherlands) and Wen Fai Fong from Northwestern University in Illinois (USA) has determined that this represents the catastrophic death of two neutron stars “destroying” each other in the center of a galaxy.
“Most stars in the universe die in a predictable way based solely on their mass. But this study reveals a new pathway leading to stellar destruction,” Dr. Levan stated.
Neutron stars, often referred to as “zombies,” are remnants of stars that are many times larger than our Sun. They have exhausted their energy and “died” once, collapsing into objects only as wide as a city but possessing a gravitational force millions of times stronger than that of Earth.
They face a second stroke of bad luck by being too close to the region with a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center, where immense gravitational forces wreak havoc, disrupting the motion of all objects and increasing the likelihood of collisions.
This ancient galaxy is also an extremely interesting and wild world to observe. It primarily hosts stars that are a few billion years old and is classified as an “inactive galaxy,” with a very low potential for new star formation. However, it has produced not just one, but several large black holes in the central region, exacerbating the disturbances.
“If you get close enough, you will see two neutron stars moving closer together until their gravitational forces distort them and they begin to break apart,” Dr. Levan described.
They also predict that this monstrous duo will meet their end by collapsing into a shared black hole, surrounded by a disc of material from what remains. The birth of the black hole will create a stream of material moving at 99.99% the speed of light, resulting in the gamma-ray burst observed from Earth.
