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This video illustrates the collision of two neutron stars (GW170817).

An international research collaboration, including four Northwestern University astronomers, is the first to detect the spectacular collision of two neutron stars in a nearby galaxy using both gravitational waves and light.

What is a neutron star? What is it like when two neutron stars collide? Northwestern University astronomers describe the GW170817 merger of these massive objects in our Universe.  

Following the October 16, 2017 announcement of the first-ever observation of a binary neutron star inspiral and merger, Northwestern’s astronomy research center, CIERA, held a discussion with the Northwestern scientists behind the discovery. View the audience question & answer period from this event.  

About 130 million years ago, two neutron stars collided, unleashing an explosion that rippled space-time and splattered the cosmos with a cocktail of heavy metals. Astronomers announced that they spotted the signals from that “kilonova” explosion, both in gravitational waves like the ones LIGO previously detected from merging black holes, and in signals across the

These are massive black hole mergers from the Illustris1 large-scale cosmological simulation  (Kelley et al 2017). Gravitational wave bursts from the final merger of each black hole pair are shown with the color representing their initial strength.