Neutron Star Crash

Just recently, astronomers observed the collision of two neutron stars, and the data they obtained caused ripples in the science community. One theory is that all the gold in the universe was created by these cataclysmic collisions. The other theory is that the idea of what dark energy is has been shattered.

First of all, a neutron star is a ultra dense zombie star that results from a supernova of a huge star, a star at least 8 times the size of our sun. The stuff that a neutron star is made of is so dense that a thimble full would weight mega tons and if dropped would pass through the Earth like a hot knife through butter. It's important to realize that a neutron is very, very tiny compared to the size of an atom. They also contain the mass of the atom, along with the protons. When neutrons are mashed together, literally touching one another, the density is off the charts.

A collision between two of these very dense objects would cause one heck of a blast of energy. Massive amounts of gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet and infrared light would literally light up the universe. The collision would also create giant ripples in space-time. The only thing that's more violent than this is the when two black holes collide.
The LIGO, Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, detected the gravity waves from a neutron star collision in the Galaxy cluster SDSS and what really got scientists' attention was the fact that the light flash from the collision happened 1.7 seconds after the gravitational waves. This indicated that the light waves and the gravity waves were travelling at essentially the same speed. They only differed by one part in 10 million billion. Basically, this is the same speed.

The theory of Dark energy would require that these speeds be different. Think of it this way. If space is expanding at an accelerating rate, the light waves should have taken longer to get here because they would have taken more time to escape from the turmoil of the collision.

One theory to come from this is that dark energy could be an exception to the rule that all particles must have fields that are not scalar. What does this mean? It means that the field is observed to exist everywhere but does not have direction. The Higgs field is an exception because it's a scalar field. It acts in all directions just like gravity. The same could be said for the dark energy field. It acts in all direction, pushing space to expand it.

The other thing to take away from this neutron star collision is that the spectra of the light from it contained evidence of many heavy elements, including gold. This could be the way that these elements are created. However, this is just a theory. It needs more observational proof.

Thanks for reading.