Neutron star chaser: Telescope spots dead suns crash

Image source, BBC News/Stelios Thoukidides

A new telescope has been developed to look at the collision of dead suns.

Heavy metals such as gold and Platinum are thought to be created by the process.

The substance that makes the stars is so heavy that it can weigh four billion tonnes.

I went to see this instrument in the mountains to see what it could do.

I met Prof Danny on the volcanic island of La Palma.

There are a dozen instruments on a mountain peak, each studying a different phenomenon. They look like white and silver sculptures when the sun is shining.

Danny, who leads the project, tells me that the new addition will allow scientists to observe the rich material that comes out of the explosion.

It was in this environment that heavy elements like gold and Platinum began to form billions of years ago.

Danny has a telescope system that is similar to a cannon. As the twin domes open, they show the batteries of the telescopes. They look threatening. The batteries cover every patch of sky above it.

They are designed to respond quickly. The light from colliding stars can only be seen in the night sky for a couple of days.

A dead sun that has collapsed under it's weight is called a neutron star. They have a strong attraction to each other. They crash and form a single entity.

A flash of light and a powerful shockwave are created when that occurs. Everything in the Universe is affected by it.

The impact of the wave distorts space. Danny's telescope searches for the exact location of the flash when it is detected on Earth.

It was more luck than design that the astronomer observed one of these colliders. GOTO has been built in order to find out what happened.

Danny says it's all hands on deck to make the most of a good detection.

It is speed that is important. There isn't a lot of time before they fade away.

They want to find flash in the sky within hours or minutes of the detection of the waves. Researchers take pictures of the sky and then remove the stars, planets and galaxies that were there the previous night. It's possible that the light that wasn't there before is from the colliding stars.

It usually takes days and weeks, but now it has to be done in real time. It's a lot of work using computer software.

It should be easy, but we are having to search through a hundred million stars for the object that we want. "Danny and I have to do this very quickly because the object will disappear within two days," says Dr. Joe Lyman.

Astronomers use bigger, more powerful telescopes across the world once they have pinpointed the collision. The collision is probed at different wavelength.

The process tells us about physics at the extreme.

There are ripples in the fabric of space time.

• Gravitational waves are a prediction of the Theory of General Relativity
• It took decades to develop the technology to directly detect them
• They are ripples in the fabric of space-time generated by violent events
• Accelerating masses will produce waves that propagate at the speed of light
• Detectable sources ought to include merging black holes and neutron stars
• Ligo/Virgo fire lasers into long, L-shaped tunnels; the waves disturb the light
• Detecting the waves opens up the Universe to completely new investigations

The mountain peak makes it easier for the astronomer to see the stars. They have a new way to look into the sky with the telescope.

She says traditional astronomy was about luck. We no longer hope for new discoveries. We're being told where to find them and how to find what's out there in the universe.

As the sun sets, Danny, Joe and Kendall start setting up GOTO in the red and amber glow. They hope that the collision far away will change our understanding of how the Universe came to be.