Colliding neutron stars revealed by gravitational waves and massive fireball

Description

A global team of thousands of scientists has tracked a burst of gravitational waves to its source for the first time.

After detecting these tiny ripples in space-time for only the fifth time in history, they used telescopes to pinpoint and directly observe the source: a fiery collision between two dead stars.

Ending weeks of speculation, researchers confirmed that on August 17 they detected gravitational waves from the explosive merger of two neutron stars, each about half the mass of the Sun, 130 million light years from Earth.

The unprecedented discovery was made by the 1,500-strong Advanced LIGO and Virgo teams in the US and Italy, and followed up by astronomers using space and land-based telescopes all over the world, including Australia.