Neutron stars — the super-dense remnants of supernovae — create gravitational waves when they collide. These ripples in space can be thought of as a silent melody: the more precisely we catch its notes, the better we understand the interiors of these objects. Back in the 1930s, Fritz Zwicky predicted their existence, and later Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered them as pulsars — spinning cosmic lighthouses.
The SPHINCS_BSSN code, developed under the guidance of Kip Thorne, for the first time accounted for heating of matter upon impact. This cut calculation errors by a factor of 10 without sacrificing speed.
It turned out that the main burst frequency after the merger shifts by 150 hertz — roughly a D note — depending on the star's internal composition.
If we could hear gravitational waves, we’d be able to tell how the insides of stars with different "recipes" sound. This paves the way for new ground-based observatories.
A neutron star the size of a city weighs as much as the Sun, and a teaspoon of its matter outweighs all people on Earth combined.
In Carl Sagan's novel "Contact," an alien signal is hidden in the gravitational waves from a binary neutron star.