drive north on a clear summer night in August, to a small town hundreds of miles away from the closest international airport. do this on a night when you're feeling jaded and it will restore your sense of awe in the universe; do this on a night when you're falling in love and find yourself reflected in every constellation in the midnight sky. stay out long enough and you will inevitably wonder how many lightyears separates one star from another.
it is lonely in the vastness of space; stars are tiny compared to the distance between them. collisions are extremely rare events in the universe: the probability of a direct collision between two stars is virtually zero in most galactic environments. however, in globular clusters like our own dear Milky Way, where stars are densely packed together compared to other places in the universe, they occur more often. scientists have been trying to categorize these encounters since the mid-20th century, mapping each collision onto the cosmic timeline; into a scientific hypothesis about how the universe came to be. there are a few distinct types of stellar collisions, and each one is an origin story.
find yourself in one of many a set of binary stars: two celestial bodies orbiting each other so closely that eventually you share the same atmosphere; so close that eventually you destabilize and become one—this kind of collision happens in our galaxy about once every 10,000 years. sometimes two binary stars become a single blue straggler star, appearing bluer and more luminous than they should be given their age and environment. blue stragglers are anomalies in old stellar populations, where such bright blue stars should have already evolved into older forms. astronomers are not the type of scientist to study questions like whether love can keep us young, but perhaps they should.
you could be two white dwarf stars, bound by the Chandrasekhar limit: if the mass of two stars exceeds this limit, it triggers a runaway nuclear fusion reaction. this leads to a thermonuclear explosion, which shows up as a type Ia supernova—an explosion so bright it outshines an entire galaxy at its peak, running so hot that it burns at billions of degrees at the core. some events are all-consuming: the white dwarf star is blown apart in the process, completely obliterated but not destroyed—after all, the First Law of Thermodynamics tells us that energy can neither be created nor be destroyed, only transformed. at close range the explosion releases so much energy that it would vaporize anything too close; the supernova explosion happens very quickly but the afterglow remains visible for months. it will take months for anyone to piece together the resulting stardust, but don't worry—you, too, will be made new. we change other each, sometimes permanently—but isn't it comforting to know that we can never be destroyed, only transformed?
you could be a pair of neutron stars, separated from each other in spacetime over cosmic timescales of millions of years but spiralling inward toward each other due to gravitational waves unknown to you and out of your control. these ripples resonate outward and create waves in the fabric of space, bringing neutron stars together until they collide. when they finally crash into each other they create an extreme burst of heat in the otherwise sub-zero temperatures of space. have you ever locked eyes with someone and thought, i need to know if we're soulmates? that's neutron star energy. neutron star collisions push the limits of extreme physics: before they merge, they are effectively cold—neutron stars are extremely dense, which means that heat adds very little to the energy of their system—but on collision, they are suddenly trillions of degrees. neutron star collisions are generative in nature: they produce gravitational waves which change the arc of the universe, electromagnetic radiation so strong it would obliterate anyone who stands too close, gamma-ray bursts which are one of the most powerful events in the universe, neutrinos which change the astrophysical timeline forever. neutron star collisions create the heaviest elements in the universe, including gold and platinum. these encounters become cosmic mythology; the kind of story that will be retold for millions of years. these collisions occur approximately once every 10,000 years in the Milky Way, but across the entire universe, a neutron star collision happens every few minutes.
Aristotle thought that Earth was the center of the universe but these days we know that he was wrong: according to popular vote, New York City is actually the center of the universe. this place is eight million people, each with their own worlds and stories and fears and fictions. the statistics for a collision seem like they would be extremely high—how hard could it be, really, when there are so many people packed together in such a small space, constantly orbiting each other? but remember: a stellar collision happens once every 10,000 years in this galaxy. you will meet a lot of people here, and you will miss each other in all sorts of really important, fundamental ways; you can orbit each other for a lifetime but never get close enough to really see each other. there is lots of spacetime in which nothing really happens, but once in a while, the way we encounter each other becomes a really big story.
the gravity between two people is impossible to model with equations and impossible to capture in high-fidelity poetry. truly, no one understands the depth of space between two people—not the astronomers, or the scientists, or the writers. the way we collide with each other in this universe and all the unseen forces which make it happen is one the of the greatest great unknowns. we are all at the mercy of cosmic gravitational waves, high-dimensional physics we cannot truthfully model, and the inexorable march of entropy across the universe. how many people do you think fall in love in New York City every minute? there is a stochastic background of weak gravitational waves constantly washing over Earth from all directions in the universe and you become part of this cosmic story in the most ordinary of ways: you think that you're special but you're just another binary star system, a moon and her Earth, a comet circling the sun. it is extraordinary only in how universal it is: you're just another stellar collision in the cosmic timeline; just another data point for science, in every way alike to the ones who came before and also an origin story all your own.
the story will unfold in ways that you cannot model and you cannot possibly know ahead of time what its trajectory will be. there are no guarantees on outcomes in love: you can drop a match but the sparks flicker out; you can collide and wreck each other. but—sometimes, rarely—you will encounter love that you will change your mind for; you will collide with another neutron star and find that suddenly everything has been lit on fire and you would cross spacetime to burn up in their atmosphere. the best of love is generative; the greatest collisions change the astrophysical timeline forever. we are all just stardust at the mercy of the unknowable forces of the universe, but sometimes in the pursuit of love we bend the universe to our will and it is forever changed.
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