Headline: “Dead Stars Collide, Unsealing Clues To Universe”
It was not a dream abed: outside walking my dogs last night, I saw and heard a pair of dead stars collide, my first glimpse at the violent process by which most of the gold and silver in the universe was created. The collision, I’ll call a “kilonova,” jolted the galaxy in which it happened 130 million light-years from here in the southern constellation of Hydra, sent oceans of fire across the universe. It sent me from poetry to my telescope, in hopes of answering one of the long-sought mysteries of the universe. I saw the collision created a cloud of gold dust many times more massive than the Earth, confirming kilonovas as agents of ancient cosmic alchemy. My dogs Honey and Margie barked at the greatest at-a-distance fireworks show in the universe. It was a century ago that Albert Einstein predicted that space and time could shake like a bowl of jelly when massive things like black holes moved around. Such waves were finally confirmed only in 2016, when Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory recorded the sound of two giant black holes colliding. Neutron stars are full of stuff, packed at the density of Mount Everest in a teaspoon, gamma rays, X-rays, radio waves, something for everyone who has a window on the sky. My friend Dr. Kalogera was in Utah hiking, getting ready for August’s total solar eclipse when he got the alarm. He recalled thinking: “Oh my God, this is it. The 50-year-old mystery, the holy grail, is solved.” Together the two signals told a tale: War and Peace and War and Peace, a pair of neutron stars spiraling around each other. Some people joked, “Napoleons and Napoleon! Duke of Wellington and Duke of Wellington!”
But where? Luckily the European Virgo antenna had joined the gravitational wave network only two weeks before, showing a faint chirp at the same time to a small region of the sky at the Hydra constellation that was in Virgo’s blind spot. The huntsman’s bugle blown, the hunt was on, Dog Stars in the lead. By then Hydra was setting in the southern sky. It would be 11 hours before astronomers in Chile could take up the chase. One Mr. Foley, who was working with a team on the Swope telescope run by the Carnegie Institution on Cerro Las Campanas in Chile, said, “These are the first optical photons from a kilonova humankind has ever collected.” Emails went flying about in the Chilean night. When it was first identified, the fireball of 8,000-degree gas was about the size of Neptune’s orbit, radiating about 200 million times as much energy as the sun. Nine days later, the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory detected X-rays coming from the location of the burst, and a week after that, the Very Large Array in New Mexico recorded radio emissions. By then the fireball faded from blue to red. From all this, I have begun patching together a tentative story of what happened in the NGC 4993 galaxy. Yes, the merging objects were probably survivors of stars that had been orbiting each other, each puffed up, then died in supernova explosions in which massive stars ended their luminous lives some 11 billion years ago. As usual I made a reasonable assumption about their spins: these neutron stars were about 1.1 and 1.6 times as massive as the sun, smack in the known range of neutron stars. As they approached each other swirling a thousand times a second, tidal forces bulged their surfaces outward, “neutron star guts” was ejected, formed a sugar doughnut around the merging stars. I estimated that an amount of gold equal to 40 to 100 times the mass of the earth could have been produced over a few days and blown into space.
In the coming eons, the doughnut could be incorporated into new stars and planets, in some far, far day become the material for earthly and alien jewelry on gigantic or tiny surviving body parts, earlobes, necks, or whatever new forms of life, vanity may treasure.
Future Roulette? The winnings something like eggs, not money, something unknown inside each egg. Resurrection? All the numbers, plus 00, the house wins. I trip on a loose shoelace. I still can’t believe how lucky we all are. (Professors recite a list of fortuitous circumstances.) They had three detectors running for only a few weeks. It was the closest gamma-ray burst ever recorded, the loudest gravitational wave. It’s all just too good to be true. But as far as I can tell it’s really true. I’m living the dream.