But neutron stars are full of stuff, matter packed at the density of Mount Everest in a teaspoon.
When neutron stars slam together, all kinds of things burst out: gamma rays, X-rays, radio waves.
“Joy for all,” said David Shoemaker, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is the spokesman for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.
One of the LIGO antennas, in Hanford, Wash., had recorded an auspicious signal and sent out an automatic alert.
The gamma-ray burst lasted about two seconds, which put it in a category of short gamma ray bursts associated with the formation of black holes perhaps as a result of neutron stars colliding.
Making reasonable assumptions about their spins, these neutron stars were about 1.1 and 1.6 times as massive as the sun, smack in the known range of neutron stars.
Quite a bit of what Dr. Metzger called “neutron star guts” were ejected and formed a fat doughnut around the merging stars. »
