{"id":233039,"date":"2026-03-11T03:41:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T08:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/nasa-finds-extreme-star-collision-in-unlikely-spot"},"modified":"2026-03-11T03:41:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T08:41:14","slug":"nasa-finds-extreme-star-collision-in-unlikely-spot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/nasa-finds-extreme-star-collision-in-unlikely-spot","title":{"rendered":"NASA finds extreme star collision in unlikely spot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/nasa-finds-extreme-star-collision-in-unlikely-spot2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A fleet of NASA missions has likely uncovered a collision between two ultradense stars in a tiny galaxy buried in a huge stream of gas. Astronomers have never seen this type of explosive event in an environment like this before\u2014and it may help solve two outstanding cosmic mysteries. A paper describing these results is forthcoming in <i>The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/i> and currently <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2510.15867\" target=\"_blank\">available<\/a> on the <i>arXiv<\/i> preprint server.<\/p>\n<p>Neutron stars are the cores left behind after a star much heavier than the sun runs out of fuel, collapses on itself, and then explodes. They are small (only a dozen or so miles across) but slightly more massive than the sun, making them amazingly dense. Astronomers consider them to be some of the most extreme objects in the universe.<\/p>\n<p>In recent years, astronomers have collected data on collisions, or mergers, of two neutron stars inside of moderately sized or large galaxies. This latest discovery, however, shows that a neutron star collision may take place inside a tiny galaxy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A fleet of NASA missions has likely uncovered a collision between two ultradense stars in a tiny galaxy buried in a huge stream of gas. Astronomers have never seen this type of explosive event in an environment like this before\u2014and it may help solve two outstanding cosmic mysteries. A paper describing these results is forthcoming [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233039\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}