Yesterday, astronomer Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) held a press conference where he presented the results of a study which suggests that all the gold on Earth was created along with other heavy elements in a collision of two neutron stars.
Light elements such as carbon and oxygen are created in the cores of massive stars when they pass through the last stages of their lives. Instead, the heavy elements are created when those stars explode in a supernova, originating energy levels of such intensity that they can create larger atoms. The problem was to explain the amount of heavy metals that exist in the solar system.
In the past decade, according to a research carried out through supercomputer simulations, heavy elements such as gold and platinum could be formed in significant amounts when two neutron stars collide and merge. A neutron star is what remains after the final collapse of a dying star that exploded in a supernova. It can have the mass of the Sun or more compressed into a very small volume.
The team directed by Edo Berger observed a gamma-ray burst called GRB 130603B occurred about 3.9 billion light years from Earth discovered a few weeks ago by the NASA’s Swift X-ray space telescope. The analysis of this gamma-ray burst, which lasted just a fraction of a second, showed the characteristics of the merge between two neutron stars.
The area in which the gamma-ray burst GRB 130603B has been observed was analyzed with other ground-based telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope, which detected a strange glow that seems to come from radioactive elements. They have begun to decay immediately after their creation, happened in the collision, creating the glow observed by telescopes.
The infrared light in that glow can prove that heavy elements such as gold have been created following the clash between the two neutron stars. The energy created was in fact extremely intense because gamma-ray bursts are the most energetic phenomenon ever observed.
According to Edo Berger, the mass of gold created as a result of the clash between two neutron stars could be up to ten times the mass of the Moon. Given the enormous distance, however, it’s impossible to think of going to pick up the gold and platinum created in the collision discovered in this research. We must also hope that such an event never occurs near the Earth because the energy emitted could sterilize it. Let’s be satisfied with the precious metals probably created in an event of that type occurred a few billion years ago.
[ad name=”AmazonDocumentary”]
