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Here's How Neutron Stars Collide And Create Black Hole [Video]

By Kamal Nayan | Update Date: May 15, 2014 10:00 AM EDT

NASA has recently released a video animation that depicts the collision of two super-dense neutron stars, resulting in the creation of a black hole.

The video, produced by scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is a supercomputer simulation.

Neutron stars are the densest and tiniest stars known to exist in the universe. These stars can measure equal to 1.5 times of the mass of the sun and could be compressed into a sphere measuring just 12 miles across.

The video shows two neutron stars spiraling toward each other, deforming. As they get closer to each other, the bigger stellar remnant crushes the smaller one causing it to erupt and forming a spiral arm around the larger neutron star.

"At 13 milliseconds, the more massive star has accumulated too much mass to support it against gravity and collapses, and a new black hole is born," NASA officials said in a statement. "The black hole's event horizon - its point of no return - is shown by the gray sphere. 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."

The formation of neutron stars takes place when a star that is eight to 30 times the mass of the sun explodes as a supernova, leaving behind the compressed dense core. According to NASA officials, one cubic centimeter of neutron star matter outweighs Mount Everest.

Last year, scientists found that the mergers of neutrons could create gold in the universe. They discovered that the collisions of neutron stars could eject as much as 10 moon masses' worth of gold, according to CS Monitor. 

Researchers also believe that the violent cosmic mergers of neutron stars can produce short gamma-ray bursts, lasting for about two seconds and unleashing as much energy as all the stars in the Milky Way will produce in more than one year.

The afterglow from these extremely bright explosions fade quickly and hence making it extremely difficult to study.

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