David Bock (NCSA Visualization and Virtual Environments Group)

Neutron stars are the cinders left over from a supernova explosion. At the instant of their creation, half a million Earth masses of matter are crushed into a ball just ten miles across; one teaspoonful of neutron star material weighs five billion tons. In rare instances, two neutron stars can orbit around each other in a binary system, releasing energy in the form of gravitational radiation. After millions of years, they spiral toward each other, moving faster and faster until they produce a crash so violent that the resulting explosion can be seen billions of light years away.

What happens during the collision?

This movie shows the results of a supercomputer simulation of what might happen when two neutron stars in a binary system collide. By the time they hit each other, they're traveling at nearly the speed of light, and orbit each other a thousand times a second. According to the calculations, the two neutron stars merge together in less than a hundredth of a second and release more energy during that time than our Sun would in ten billion years!

Gordon Myers