An amazing new NASA video shows two super-dense neutron stars tearing each other apart in a cataclysmic cosmic merger that ultimately forms a black hole.
The neutron star collision video, which was produced by scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, is a supercomputer simulation. It starts off with two neutron stars — the city-size, dense remnants of a violent supernova explosion — separated by about 11 miles (18 kilometers), NASA officials said.
One object contains about 1.7 times the mass of our sun, while the other weighs in at 1.4 solar masses.
The two neutron stars spiral toward each other, deforming. As they get closer and closer to each other, the bigger stellar remnant crushes the smaller one, causing it to erupt and form a spiral arm around the larger neutron star, according to NASA.
"At 13 milliseconds, the more massive star has accumulated too much mass to support it against gravity and collapses, and a new black hole is born," NASA officials said in a statement.
"The black hole's event horizon, its point of no return, is shown by the gray sphere. While most of the matter from both neutron stars will fall into the black hole, some of the less-dense, faster-moving matter manages to orbit around it, quickly forming a large and rapidly rotating torus."
Neutron stars form when a star that is eight to 30 times the mass of the sun explodes as a supernova, leaving behind the compressed, dense core.
One cubic centimeter (0.06 cubic inches) of neutron star matter outweighs Mount Everest, NASA officials said.
In 2013, scientists found that mergers of neutron stars could create the gold in the universe. A group of astronomers, led by Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, discovered that the collisions of neutron stars could eject as much as 10 moon masses' worth of gold.
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