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As a result, scientists are now looking into what caused

Dec. 26, 2018 by James Ashley

As a result, scientists are now looking into what caused the collision—and their answers.

"The biggest challenge in investigating these structures is to understand what's going on, and what's happening to them, and how they fit together," says Jonathan Shumaker, a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge. "But how do they go through all those different ways to form, and how do they connect to one another, as we have for so many other kinds of objects?"

The Fermi Space Telescope and the LIGO/VIRGO detectors are both expected to be operational in 2018.

The researchers studied neutron-star collisions over several thousand years, and the most recent observations confirmed that the first neutron-star collision was made about 2.5 million years ago. The first neutron-star collision was triggered nearly simultaneously by the merger of two neutron stars, forming a single mass of neutrons that was large enough to collapse into a black hole shortly afterwards. Before the black hole appeared, however, lots of material was ejected into space, where it formed heavier elements.

The first neutron-star collision was triggered nearly simultaneously by the merger of two neutron stars, forming a single mass of neutrons that was large enough to collapse into a black hole shortly afterwards. Before the black hole appeared, however, lots of material was ejected into space, where it formed heavier elements.

"There's a huge question of how this happens," says Prof. Shumaker. "What would happen if we saw a neutron-star collision like this? We know a lot about the structure of neutron stars, so we need to find out that there are lots of particles in them as well. But what we don't know is which of these particles could be the ones that make up the first neutron star. If we knew that and also knew that they were heavier than our own, we would be able to see what they are."