A conflict two stars of neutrons that produced an explosion in the form perfect sphere, European astrophysicists discovered. It remains a mystery, as they say, how this happens.

The researchers from Denmark, Germany, Britain, Finland and Israel, led by scientists University of Copenhagen, made the relevant publication in the journal “Nature”. The discovery concerns a violent kilonova explosion first detected in 2017 by the LIGO (USA) and Virgo (Europe) gravitational wave observatories in a distant galaxy 140 million years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Hydra.

Follow-up observation of the burst named AT2017gfo/GW170817 by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile revealed that it was perfectly symmetrical and perfectly spherical, something unexpected.

“No one expected the explosion to look like this. It doesn’t make sense that it’s so spherical like a ball. But our calculations clearly show that it does. This probably means that the kilonova theories and simulations we’ve done over the last 25 years show missing important physics,” said Associate Professor Darrah Watson of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

“The most likely way for an explosion to become spherical is for a huge amount of energy to be released from the center of the explosion and then create a shape that would not normally have symmetry. So the spherical shape tells us that there is probably a lot of energy at the core of the explosion. explosion, which was not predicted,” said lead researcher Albert Schneppen.

Neutron stars (pulsars) are extreme condensed stars consisting mainly of neutrons and usually having a diameter of only 20 kilometersbut they have weight almost twice that of the Sun. A teaspoon of neutron star matter weighs about as much as Mount Everest.

When two neutron stars collide, the kilonova explosion occurs, as they initially merge into a single massive neutron star, which then collapses into a black hole. In theory, kilonovae had been predicted since 1974, but they were first clearly observed in 2013.