There's gold in them thar neutron stars

There's gold in them thar neutron stars

There's gold in them thar neutron stars

The gold glinting on your own wedding ring was likely born within a cataclysmic merger of two exceedingly exotic stars, astronomers report Wednesday.

Dying stars vast amounts of years back cooked up almost all of the lighter elements within the universe, the oxygen in the air and calcium in our bones, and blasted it across the cosmos of their final explosive moments. We are stardust, since the singer Joni Mitchell input it.

But some of the heaviest atoms, including gold, defied this explanation, requiring a much more exotic origin.

A group led by Harvard astronomer Edo Berger now reports that gold is probable created as a possible aftereffect from the collision of two "neutron" stars. Neutron stars are themselves the collapsed remains of imploded stars, incredibly dense stellar objects that weigh at least 1. four times just as much as sunshine but which are usually under 10 miles wide.

While ordinary stars explode about once every century in our galaxy, Berger says, explosive collisions of two neutron stars happen approximately once every 10,000 years. Plus it appears they spew out gold along with other heavy elements in the week after their merger.

"Call it the golden glow," Berger says. "In such cases, we could observe it the very first time to see how a merger seems to be producing (the) heavy elements."

The c's bases its finding on observations of a high-energy flash of gamma rays, a "gamma ray burst" called GRB 130603B that has been detected in June by NASA's Swift X-ray telescope satellite. The burst can be regarded as a signature of the explosive union of two neutron stars, in such cases ones some 3.9 billion light-years away (one light year is around 5.9 trillion miles) the group reports in an Astrophysical Journal Letters report.