Neutron star smash-up the ‘discovery of a lifetime’

Paris : “Truly a eureka moment”, “Everything I ever hoped for”, “A dream come true” -- Normally restrained scientists reached for the stars Monday to describe the feelings that accompany a “once-in-a-lifetime” event.

The trigger for this meteor shower of superlatives was the smash-up of two unimaginably dense neutron stars 130 million years ago, when T-rex still lorded over our planet.

Evidence of this cosmic clash hurtled through space and reached Earth on August 17 at exactly 12:41 GMT, setting in motion a secret, sleepless, weeks-long blitzkrieg of star-gazing and number-crunching involving hundreds of telescopes and thousands of astronomers and astrophysicists around the world.

It was as if a dormant network of super-spies simultaneously sprung into action.

The stellar smash-up made itself known in two ways: it created ripples called gravitational waves in Einstein’s time-space continuum, and lit up the entire electromagnetic spectrum of light, from gamma rays to radio waves.

Scientists had detected gravitational waves four times before, a feat acknowledged with a Nobel Physics Prize earlier this
month.

But each of those events, generated by the collision of black holes, lasted just a few seconds, and remained invisible to Earth- and space-based
telescopes.

The neutron star collision was different.

It generated gravitational waves -- picked up by two US-based observatories known as LIGO, and another one in Italy called Virgo -- that lasted an astounding 100 seconds. Less than two seconds later, a NASA satellite recorded a burst of gamma rays.