This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Later in the hour, a look at robots and how we live with them.

But first, this week, astronomers reported on the strange sounding case of two colliding neutron stars,

and a blast from that merger that appeared to be traveling faster than the speed of light.

Well, you know how impossible that might sound, right? Time to change the laws of physics? Maybe not. Here to talk about that and other selected short subjects in science is Ryan Mandelbaum, science writer at Gizmodo, back in our New York studios. Welcome to back. Good to have you. Nice having you, Ira. How's everything going? Happy Roes Shana. Everybody out on the radio.

Everybody who's celebrating. Let's talk about these neutron stars. What happened? What was going on there?

So I think a lot of the listeners will remember the colliding neutron stars. One of the big, you know, that happened back in last August.

There was gravitational waves at the same time as light beams. So these jets looked like they were, you know, when you looked up, you looked like there was light traveling faster than the speed of light. But that's not really what happened. That's actually an optical illusion. When the jet sort of travels from there, you know, from the colliding neutron stars in our direction, but slightly askew, the jet is traveling at nearly the speed of light, as are the light beams. So the front of the jet's light beams and the front of the jet's light beams come to earth, and when you look it up in the sky, it looks like it zips at fast and the speed of light, but it's really an optical illusion. What's more interesting is that it's proved that there was a jet that came out of these black holes,

which is what scientists were excited about, out of these neutron stars.

Well, but something seemed off about the observation, right?

There was a burst of particles out of the debris?

Right.

So people were wondering whether when they looked up, they noticed that these radio waves

have been brightening in this collision for a couple months. And so they thought maybe it was because there was a cocoon that was like choking this jet. But the jet must have broken through the cocoon in order for scientists who have seen the faster than light motion. Well, let's move on to other cosmic news and a big prize. This is really an interesting story. Big prize, but to Jocelyn Bell Burnell?

Oh, yeah. I mean, everybody's heard Jocelyn Bell Burnell's name. She discovered pulsars,

but in 1974, the Nobel Prize in physics, went to her advisor, Anthony Hewish, instead of to her.

She was second on the paper, and a lot of people consider this a snub.

She said that she didn't think it was such a snub because she didn't know if graduate

students should get it, but, I mean, the Pulsar discovery is certainly one of the most

important discoveries in astronomy.

I mean, neutron stars are just so ubiquitous in astronomy today.

But she won the breakthrough prize, $3 million,

and she's going to donate the entire sum of money

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