The Secret Lives of Neutron Stars

Forget archaeologists and their lost civilizations, or paleontologists with their fossils—astrophysicist Heloise Stevance studies the past on an entirely different scale. When astronomers catch a glimpse of an unusual signal in the sky, perhaps the light from a star exploding, Stevance takes that signal and rewinds the clock on it by billions of years. Working at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, she traces the past lives of dead and dying stars, a process she calls stellar genealogy. “There’s a lot of drama in the lives of stars,” she says. 

On August 17, 2017, astrophysicists witnessed two dead stars’ remnant cores, known as neutron stars, colliding into each other in a distant galaxy. Known as a neutron star merger, they detected this event via ripples in spacetime—known as gravitational waves—and light produced by the resulting explosion. This marked the first and only time scientists had seen such an event using gravitational waves. From those signals, they deduced that the neutron stars were 1.1 to 1.6 times the mass of the Sun. They also figured out that such collisions create some of the heavier natural elements found in the universe, such as gold and platinum. But overall, the signals presented more puzzles than answers. 

Researchers don’t know how common these mergers are, and they can’t tell whether they are responsible for creating all the heavy elements in the universe, or just a fraction. But if astrophysicists could observe more of these mergers, they could answer these and even deeper questions—such as how old the universe is. This is where stellar genealogy can help. 

In a study published in January in Nature Astronomy, Stevance and her colleagues used observations of the collision to delve into the neutron stars’ past. They infer details about the billions of years prior to the collision, when the two objects were still fusing hydrogen in their cores as two regular stars, orbiting each other as a unit known as a binary star system. By understanding these binary stars and their evolution in more detail, her team is striving to figure out how to more systematically search for, and thus understand, these merger events. 

According to Stevance and her team’s analysis, the two neutron stars in the collision were, respectively, the remains of a star 13 to 24 times the mass of the Sun and another star 10 to 12 times the mass of the Sun. Both began shining between 5 and 12.5 billion years ago, and at that time, only 1 percent of the stars’ makeup consisted of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

The work also describes interactions between the two stars before they burned out their fuel to become neutron stars. They started tens of millions of kilometers apart, which sounds far but is actually well under the distance between Earth and the Sun. Each star’s exterior was surrounded by gas known as a stellar envelope. Stevance and her team’s models determined that over the stars’ lifetimes, one star’s envelope engulfed the other—that is, their outer gases merged to become a single shared envelope—at least twice.

It’s a lot of detail about two faraway objects, especially if you consider the astrophysicists only directly observed their extremely violent end. The team reconstructed a city from a pile of dust. To deduce so much from so little, they combined observations of the neutron stars with insights gleaned from studying other stars and galaxies, having created a behemoth of a mathematical model of both observed and hypothetical stars. The model contains detailed descriptions of the temperature, chemical composition, and other features of 250,000 different types of star, from their interiors to their surfaces, and how these properties change as each star burns fuel and eventually dies. In addition, the model can simulate entire galaxies, each containing multiple collections of stars of different ages and chemical compositions. 

And so to uncover the merged neutron stars’ past, Stevance and her colleagues worked to replicate the data observed for the neutron stars within their model, which could then tell them the most likely scenarios of what happened before the two stars merged. For example, they concluded that the stars shared an envelope multiple times because of how long it took the two objects to collide. When two binary stars merge envelopes, the gases in that shared envelope create a drag force that slows down the stars’ orbit, which then causes the stars to spiral in toward each other, quickly shrinking the distance between them. To merge as quickly as their remnant cores did, the stars needed to share envelopes several times.