Light from LIGO’s neutron star smashup just got even brighter

Illustration of colliding neutron stars

The neutron star beam is weirder than we thought

NSF/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet

The leftovers from the first neutron star smashup we’ve ever seen have surprised us. The beam of light that jetted out of the explosion has gotten even brighter in the three months since the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) and other observatories spotted the collision. This brightening may mean that similar jets of x-rays and gamma radiation are more complicated than we thought.

At the beginning of December, astronomers used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to take another look at the spot where we watched a neutron star smash-up in August. They saw three times more X-ray radiation in the area than directly after the explosion that generated the gravitational waves LIGO saw.

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“Initially, we thought that this jet from the neutron stars exploding was a simple cone of light,” says Eleonora Troja at


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