The neutron star collision heard and seen around the world has failed to fade. That lingering glow could mean that a jet of bright matter created in the crash has diffused into a glowing, billowy cocoon that surrounds the merged star, researchers report online December 20 in Nature.
Gravitational waves from the collision between two ultradense stellar corpses was picked up in August by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, LIGO, and its sister experiment in Italy, Advanced Virgo (SN: 11/11/17, p. 6). Using telescopes on the ground and in space, physicists raced to conduct follow-up observations, and found that the collision released light across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Right away, the event looked unusual, says astrophysicist Kunal Mooley, who conducted the research while at the University of Oxford. Physicists think that a jet of fast-moving, bright material blasts out of the center of neutron star collisions. If that jet is aimed directly at Earth, telescopes can see it as an ephemeral flash of light called a short gamma-ray burst, or GRB.
The radio afterglow of the neutron star collision (GW170817) in galaxy NGC 4993 was spotted with the Very Large Array radio observatory in New Mexico on September 2, 16 days after the gravitational waves from the collision were detected.
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