When Scientists Discovered Neutron Stars Colliding, How Did Artists Know What to Draw?

They didn’t, really.

By Neel V. Patel

On Monday, scientists announced they had detected gravitational waves emitted by the violent collision of an ultra-dense pair of neutron stars 130 million light-years away, complemented by observations of the light emissions ejected by the incendiary event. While the first four gravitational wave detections made since February 2016 have all resulted from black holes slamming into one another, this new one, first observed on Aug. 17, is the first time scientists have observed such signals created by a kilonova: a supernova formed by the cosmic crash of two neutron stars.

There are a lot of fascinating things about this arguably quite technical discovery. For one thing, this type of collision is responsible for forging