Not much can be done in a few hundred thousandths of a second, but for neutron stars that’s more than enough time to teach us something about the life, death and birth of black holes, RT reports.
By sifting through an archive of high-energy flashes in the night sky, astronomers recently discovered patterns in light fluctuations left by two different groups of colliding stars that signal a halt on their journey from a super-dense object to an infinite dark hole. .
This pause — between 10 and 300 milliseconds — is technically equivalent to two newly formed neutron stars that researchers believe are spinning fast enough to briefly halt their inevitable fate as black holes.
University of Maryland astronomer Cole Miller says: “We know that short GRBs form when spinning neutron stars collide, and we know that they eventually collapse into a black hole. But the exact sequence of events is not clear. College Park (UMCP) is well known in the United States
For nearly 30 years, the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory has been orbiting Earth, collecting bright X-rays and gamma rays released by cataclysmic events. The Active Photon Archive contains a wide range of data on things like colliding neutron stars that release powerful radiation pulses known as gamma-ray bursts.
Neutron stars twice the mass of our sun fit into space the size of a small city. Not only does it do strange things to matter, forcing electrons to form protons into a thick dust of neutrons, but it can create magnetic fields unlike anything else in the universe.
Spinning at high speeds, these fields can accelerate particles to high speeds, forming polar jets that appear to “pulse” like supercharged lights.
Neutron stars form when ordinary stars (about 8 to 30 times the mass of our sun) burn through their last fuel, leaving behind a core of 1.1 to 2.3 solar masses that is too cool to bear its gravity. The basic theory of this process is quite simple and sets general limits on the mass of a neutron star before it collapses. For cold, non-rotating spheres, the upper mass limit is less than three solar masses, but it also points to a complication that might simplify the journey from the neutron star to the black hole.
For example, earlier last year, physicists reported the discovery of a gamma-ray burst, GRB 180618A, detected in 2018. Behind the radiation, they detected the signature of a magnetically charged neutron star called a magnetar, one whose mass is close to that of the two colliding stars.