File:Binary Neutron Star Merger (without magnetic fields).webm

English: This movie shows the final stages of the coalescence and the merging of two neutron stars. Neutron stars are dense objects created in certain supernova explosions, and concentrate around 1.5 solar masses inside a radius less than 20 km. The merger shown in the movie is happening much faster in reality, within less than a hundredth of a second, and produces strong gravitational waves. Matter ejected from merging neutron stars is also the most likely source for the creation of heavy elements in the universe, such as gold. The movie illustrates one of the possible scenarios for the merger event ("GW170817") that was recently detected by the LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave detector network. The outcome of this merger could have been a black hole or a stable neutron star. In this movie, a short-lived neutron star is produced that collapses quickly to a black hole. The white solid surfaces depict the surfaces of the two neutron stars and the merged object. The black hole horizon is shown as yellow surface for better visibility. The movie also shows that the remnant is surrounded by a debris disk of hot plasma much denser than any matter on Earth. This disk is visualized as transparent layers. The movie shows a case with slightly different masses than the detected event. The main uncertainty when predicting the outcome is however the behavior of matter at the extreme densities reached in neutron stars. In fact, performing computer simulations based on different assumption will help us to better understand superdense matter.

Visualisation: Wolfgang Kastaun Simulation: T. Kawamura, B. Giacomazzo, W. Kastaun, R. Ciolfi, and A. Endrizzi

Acknowledgements Those results were obtained with the help of the following grants: PRACE grant GRSimStar (PI Giacomazzo) MIUR FIR grant No. RBFR13QJYF (PI Giacomazzo)

Reference: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016PhRvD..94f4012K