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Temperatures of 800 billion degrees in the cosmic kitchen

HADES experiment simulates colliding and merging neutron stars

Date:
August 22, 2019
Source:
Technical University of Munich (TUM)
Summary:
It is among the most spectacular events in the universe: a merger of neutron stars. Astronomers have completed the first laboratory measurements of thermal electromagnetic radiation arising in such collisions. The resulting data enabled them to calculate the prevailing temperature when such stars merge.
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When two neutron stars collide, the matter at their core enters extreme states. An international research team has now studied the properties of matter compressed in such collisions. The HADES long-term experiment, involving more than 110 scientists, has been investigating forms of cosmic matter since 1994. With the investigation of electromagnetic radiation arising when stars collide, the team has now focused attention on the hot, dense interaction zone between two merging neutron stars.

Simulation of electromagnetic radiation

Collisions between stars cannot be directly observed -- not least of all because of their extreme rarity. According to estimates, none has ever happened in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The densities and temperatures in merging processes of neutron stars are similar to those occurring in heavy ion collisions, however. This enabled the HADES team to simulate the conditions in merging stars at the microscopic level in the heavy ion accelerator at the Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt.

As in a neutron star collision, when two heavy ions are slammed together at close to the speed of light, electromagnetic radiation is produced. It takes the form of virtual photons that turn back into real particles after a very short time. However, the virtual photons occur very rarely in experiments using heavy ions. "We had to record and analyze about 3 billion collisions to finally reconstruct 20,000 measurable virtual photons," says Dr. Jürgen Friese, the former spokesman of the HADES collaboration and researcher at Laura Fabbietti's Professorship on Dense and Strange Hadronic Matter at TUM.

Photon camera shows collision zone

To detect the rare and transient virtual photons, researchers at TUM developed a special 1.5 square meter digital camera. This instrument records the Cherenkov effect: the name given to certain light patterns generated by decay products of the virtual photons. "Unfortunately the light emitted by the virtual photons is extremely weak. So the trick in our experiment was to find the light patterns," says Friese. "They could never be seen with the naked eye. We therefore developed a pattern recognition technique in which a 30,000 pixel photo is rastered in a few microseconds using electronic masks. That method is complemented with neural networks and artificial intelligence."

Observing the material properties in the laboratory

The reconstruction of thermal radiation from compressed matter is a milestone in the understanding of cosmic forms of matter. It enabled the scientists to place the temperature of the new system resulting from the merger of stars at 800 billion degrees celsius. As a result, the HADES team was able to show that the merging processes under consideration are in fact the cosmic kitchens for the fusion of heavy nucleii.


Story Source:

Materials provided by Technical University of Munich (TUM). Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:

  1. The HADES-Collaboration. Probing dense baryon-rich matter with virtual photons. Nature Physics, 2019 DOI: 10.1038/s41567-019-0583-8

Cite This Page:

Technical University of Munich (TUM). "Temperatures of 800 billion degrees in the cosmic kitchen." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 22 August 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190822101419.htm>.
Technical University of Munich (TUM). (2019, August 22). Temperatures of 800 billion degrees in the cosmic kitchen. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 28, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190822101419.htm
Technical University of Munich (TUM). "Temperatures of 800 billion degrees in the cosmic kitchen." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190822101419.htm (accessed March 28, 2024).

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