Neutron star discovery named Breakthrough of the Year

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The journal Science said on Thursday that the first-ever detection of a collision between two faraway neutron stars which caused a massive blast that rippled through the fabric of space and time, was judged the scientific breakthrough of 2017.

The smashup of the two ultra-dense stars observed on August 17 "confirmed several key astrophysical models, revealed a birthplace of many heavy elements, and tested the general theory of relativity as never before," said the report.

The blast, which occurred 130 million light-years away, is the kind of event that produces as much as half of the universe's gold, platinum, uranium and mercury, experts said.

Scientists for the first time witnessed the smashup of two ultra-dense neutron stars on August 17. /VCG Photo

Shock waves ran through the scientific community when the discovery was announced in October, after being detected by gravitational wave sensors in the US and Europe, and some 70 telescopes and observatories around the world.

Bangalore Sathyaprakash from Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy recalled the moment as "the most exciting of my scientific life."

The magazine's annual rundown of the top advances of the past year also included the discovery of a new kind of orangutan, Pongo tapanuliensis, with just 800 believed to live in an isolated Indonesian forest.

Pongo tapanuliensis, identified as a new species of orangutan /Reuters Photo

Another was a second look at a skull unearthed from a Moroccan cave in 1961, showing that it was actually about 300,000 years old - a full 100,000 years older than early homo sapiens were previously known to exist.

The findings have "reinvigorated the search for new fossils of our species' earliest members," said the report.

Two views of a composite reconstruction of the earliest known Homo sapiens fossils from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco /Reuters Photo

The successful gene therapy trial in children with spinal muscular atrophy 1 (SMA1), the most common genetic cause of death in infants, also made the list.

Eleven of the 12 babies who were infused with a high dose of intravenous AAV9 gene therapy – carrying the gene for a missing protein – "can talk, eat, and sit at least briefly on their own," it said.

A genetic advance called base-editing that may help eliminate certain diseases also made the top 10, along with the approval of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) by Merck to kill a range of cancers based on their DNA rather than their location in the body.

Source(s): AFP