They add another milestone to the discoveries made by the still young James Webb Space Telescope. NASA reports through its portal the detection of a neutron star undergoing a merger with a black hole, which is located 120 thousand light years away from Earth.
The discovery, beyond how impressive it is to see a neutron star merging with a black hole, is fundamental since in this event elements of the periodic table related to life are detected.
The merger between a neutron star and a black hole is called kilanovaa very complex event to see from Earth and that was achieved thanks to the use of the James Webb Space Telescope and the collaboration of the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, both from NASA.
The powerful kilanova generated a brutal burst of gamma rays that they identified as GRB 230307A, and it was there that they identified the chemical element tellurium and possibly iodine, necessary for much of life on Earth.
“Just over 150 years since Dmitri Mendeleev wrote the periodic table of elements, we are now finally in a position to start filling in those last few blanks to understand where everything was made, thanks to Webb,” says Andrew Levan of the University of Radboud in the Netherlands and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, lead author of the study.
“In later times it would have been impossible to study this kilonova from Earth, but these were the perfect conditions for Webb’s NIRCam (near-infrared camera) and NIRSpec (near-infrared spectrograph) instruments to observe this tumultuous environment,” explains NASA in its review of this discovery.
“The spectrum has broad lines that show that the material is ejected at high speeds, but one characteristic is clear: the light emitted by tellurium, an element rarer than platinum on Earth,” they added.
These two heavy elements were once two common massive stars like our Sun, but with the difference that together they formed a binary solar system, within a spiral galaxy.