The supercomputer simulated video, produced by the scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, underlines one of the most hostile episodes in the order of the universe. The simulation may enable scientists to better understand one of the universe's mysteries such as black holes, as well as the heaviest elements conceived by the cosmos.
The video begins with two neutron stars about 11 miles apart circling on each other. As the pace continues to increase both stars deform. One star with 1.7 solar masses abruptly went through a massive head-on collision with the smaller neutron star, having only a mass 1.4 times the sun's mass, at about seven milliseconds, ultimately creating a very hot "spiral arm" of the bigger neutron star.
Neutron stars are relatively smaller than our Sun, measuring only an average of six miles in diameter or the size of a city on Earth. They form after giant stars die in supernovas and their cores collapse, leaving only particles of protons and electrons that both fused with each other to become neutrons.
While these stellar remnants are a tad smaller than our Sun, they are the densest and tiniest stars known, cramming into their tiny bodies large amounts of mass that is 1.4 greater than that of the Sun's. To give a clearer picture of its mass, NASA explained that a single cubic meter of the neutron star is as heavy as the Mount Everest.
In just 13 milliseconds, the two neutron stars became a single, denser and more massive star that has hoarded too much of mass than it can handle. It collapses, bringing to life a new black hole in space. "The black hole's event horizon - its point of no return - is shown by the gray sphere," NASA said in the description portion of the video uploaded on YouTube.
To cap off the birth of a black hole, the merged neutron stars disperse short gamma ray bursts that last for only two seconds but strong enough to match the energy of all the stars in the galaxy for a year.
"While most of the matter from both neutron stars will fall into the black hole, some of the less dense, faster moving matter manages to orbit around it, quickly forming a large and rapidly rotating torus. This torus extends for about 124 miles (200 km) and contains the equivalent of 1/5th the mass of our sun," NASA concluded.
