Video: Modeling the Post-GW170817 Fireball (to Help Estimate the Hubble Constant) (VIDEO)
Caption
The collision of two neutron stars (GW170817) flung out an extraordinary fireball of material and energy that is allowing a Princeton-led team of astrophysicists to calculate the Hubble constant, the speed of the universe's expansion. They used a super-high-resolution radio 'movie' (left) that they compared to a computer model (right). To generate their 'movie,' the science team combined data from enough radio telescopes spread over a large enough region to generate an image with such high resolution that if it were an optical camera, it could see individual hairs on someone's head 6 miles away. The movie emphasizes observations taken 75 days and 230 days after the merger. The middle panel shows the radio afterglow light curve.
Credit
Video by Ore Gottlieb and Ehud Nakar, Tel Aviv University
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