Mergers
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Artist's impression of a neutron star merger
Neutron star mergers release enormous amounts of radiation that could cause extinction events at interstellar distances.[3] In Greg Egan's 1997 novel Diaspora, where most of far-future humanity has embraced posthumanism and had their minds uploaded to computers, the remainder is wiped out when the radiation from such an event strikes the Earth.[3][12] Besides depictions of the aftermath, Baxter's 2000 novel Manifold: Space (a.k.a. Space: Manifold 2) depicts the construction of immense radiation shields to serve as protection, and the 2005–2006 television series Threshold portrays the lead-up to the anticipated destruction of the Earth by the shockwave from a neutron star merger.[1][3] The opposite process of a neutron star being disrupted by a binary companion appears in Eric Kotani's 1999 novel Death of a Neutron Star. In the story, observers worry that the mass loss could result in the neutron-forming process happening in reverse, rapidly releasing potentially calamitous amounts of energy.[1]
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