There’s not much to do in a few hundred thousand seconds. Still, for a neutron star seen in the flash of two gamma-ray bursts, that’s more than enough time to teach us a thing or two about life, death, and birth. black hole.
By sifting through archives of high-energy flashes in the night sky, astronomers recently discovered the oscillating pattern of light left by two colliding star clusters, marking a break in their journey from super-dense objects to infinite black holes. .
This lag – between 10 and 300 milliseconds – is technically equivalent to that of two very massive and newly formed neutron stars, which researchers believe are spinning fast enough to stop their inevitable fate as black holes.
“We know that short GRBs form when orbiting neutron stars collide, and we know that they eventually collapse Black holeHowever, the exact sequence of events is not well understood. Say Cole Miller, astronomer at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) in the United States.
“We found this gamma ray pattern in two of the bursts Compton observed in the early 1990s.”
For nearly 30 years, it has Compton Gamma-ray Observatory It circles the Earth and collects X-ray and gamma-ray luminosity that spills over from a distant catastrophic event. This archive contains high-energy photons Datasets about things like Neutron stars collide, which release powerful waves of radiation known as gamma-ray bursts.
Neutron stars are the true beasts of the universe. It packs twice the mass of our Sun into an area of space roughly the size of a small town. That’s not all he does Strange things matterBy forcing electrons to form protons to turn them into dense neutron dust, he can generate a magnetic field unlike anything else in the universe.
Spinning at high speed, these fields can accelerate particles to very high speeds, forming poles Jets that seem to “pulse” Like a supercharged flare.
Neutron stars form when more ordinary stars (about 8 to 30 times the mass of our sun) burn up their last fuel, leaving a core of about 1.1 to 2.3 solar masses too cold to withstand its gravitational pressure.
Add a little more mass – like two squeezed neutron stars – and even the faint vibrations of its quantum field can’t resist the gravitational pull of destroying the living physics of a dead star. From the dense mass of particles we get, well, the indescribable horror is that this is the heart of a black hole.
The basic theory of operations is very clear, Set general boundaries About how heavy a bintang neutron Maybe before it collapses. For a ball of cold, non-rotating matter, this upper bound is just under three solar masses, but it also points to complications that might make the journey from the neutron star to the black hole less straightforward.
As an example, early last year Physicists announced the detection of a gamma-ray burst called GRB 180618A, which was discovered in 2018. In the remnants of the explosion, they detected the signature of a magnetically charged neutron star called a magneticone with a mass close to that of two colliding stars.
Barely a day later, this heavyweight neutron star ceased to exist, no doubt succumbing to its immense mass and turning into something not even light could escape.
How it managed to defy gravity for that long remains a mystery, although its magnetic field may play a role.
These two new discoveries could also provide some clues.
A more accurate term for the pattern observed in the gamma-ray bursts recorded by Compton in the early 1990s is Quasi-periodic oscillations. The mix of rising and falling frequencies in the signal can be decoded to describe the massive objects’ final moments as they orbit each other and then collide.
From what the researchers know, each collision results in an object about 20 percent larger than The current heavyweight record holder bintang neutron – a pulsar Calculated to be 2.14 times the mass of our sun. It is also twice the diameter of an ordinary neutron star.
Interestingly, the objects rotate at an incredible speed of about 78,000 times per minute, much faster than the speed of A pulsar marked J1748-2446adwhich only runs 707 cycles per second.
The few cycles that every neutron star has managed in its brief, split-second lifetime can be powered by enough angular momentum to withstand its own gravitational burst.
How this might apply to the merger of other neutron stars, which are further blurring the boundaries of stellar collapse and black hole formation, is a question for future research.
This research has been published in alam.
