It’s a lot of detail about two faraway objects, especially if you consider the astrophysicists only directly observed their extremely violent end. The team reconstructed a city from a pile of dust. To deduce so much from so little, they combined observations of the neutron stars with insights gleaned from studying other stars and galaxies, having created a behemoth of a mathematical model of both observed and hypothetical stars. The model contains detailed descriptions of the temperature, chemical composition, and other features of 250,000 different types of star, from their interiors to their surfaces, and how these properties change as each star burns fuel and eventually dies. In addition,
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