Everything in our universe is moving. Planets, stars, asteroids, and moons. Even entire galaxies, which we’ve discovered so far, are moving. We see evidence of this in the way galaxies collide and merge, how black holes become one, and even in how stars collide. We’ve now discovered that stars can die in a completely new way, and we have a trigger to stellar explosions which we had not previously considered.
We’ve known for some time that stars can eat away at each other, ripping the energy and matter from each other until nothing is left but remnants. Astronomers now have evidence to suggest that collisions of stars between them can also cause the star’s death. The new evidence, which can be found in a paper published in Nature Astronomy, suggests gamma-ray bursts can be created by stellar collisions.
The evidence was discovered using the Gamini South telescope in Chile and the Nordic Optical Telescope, as well as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers used the telescopes to check back in on gamma-ray bursts spotted by the Swift Observatory in 2019. The bursts were called GRB 191019A and were quite long, lasting a bit over a moment.
The researchers managed to find the burst’s origin, deep in the core of an ancient galaxy, roughly 100 light-years out from the core. Based on those observations, the astronomers believe that the collision of two compact objects led to the gamma-ray burst’s creation, and that it wasn’t just a massive star collapsing. Instead, the death of two stars appears to have fueled the burst.
The finding was especially intriguing, because this galaxy is ancient and most of the stars that would have produced gamma rays in supernovas are dead. As such, the astronomers were baffled when the burst led them back to that particular galaxy. However, this new evidence does highlight a terrifying reality — that even stellar collisions can result in the death of massive stars, something that could prove devastating for other star systems in the future.
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