This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Last year, astronomers observe two neutron stars collide,

a crash transmitted in gravitational waves to detectors here on Earth.

Represented in sound, you can hear a small upward sweep and frequency in the data, if you

listen closely.

Several seconds later, the first waves of electromagnetic radiation arrived here on Earth.

The first time a collision has been detected by both light and gravitational waves. And it's in studying the electromagnetic echoes of the

collision that astrophysicists have gotten a far better glimpse of what really happened

after those binary neutron stars merged 130 million light years away.

Oh yeah absolutely so it gives us an understanding of basically all the litigrities of what is going on after the merger takes place.

Kunol Mule, an astrophysicist at Caltech. First he says the stars collided,

creating a massive black hole-like object, which started sucking up the cloud of neutron-rich

cosmic debris left over from the crash.

But its appetite was limited.

It cannot eat all of it.

So some bit of it basically escapes.

Those escaping leftovers spewed outward into space

as a powerful jet.

But along the way, Mule says,

the jet appears to have interacted with that cloud of neutron-rich material,

blowing up a sort of cocoon within the debris floating around the collision.

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