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Colliding, Exploding Stars May Have Created All the Gold On Earth
coondoggie writes "Two dead stars smashing into each other and releasing massive amounts of energy may have created all of the heavy elements such as gold found on Earth. That's the main conclusion of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) researchers who estimated such a collision and subsequent blast of energy known as a gamma-ray burst produced and ejected as much as 10 moon masses worth of heavy elements — including gold."
I thought this was old news.
This just in... Fish were also created from a massive explosion in the universe...
Everything I read on astrophysics and cosmology theorized that they were made in supernova explosions. And why would anyone link to networkworld.com for astrophysics news?
... for an event like that.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
.. smash two stars together, close enough to the earth to collect all of the gold .. GOLD!!!
I thought our heavy elements came mostly from the short-lived first generation of hypergiant hydrogen stars going supernova. If this theory is true, then are we lucky to have so much on this planet? I think about all the lead here, much of which is the end product of nuclear decay over billions of years from radioactive elements that must have been more abundant at some point.
I also wonder if our protoplanetary disc acted like a gold pan during the formation of the solar system, so Mercury might have lots of heavy elements as well as Venus (talk about hard to mine!)
Maybe our solar system would be attractive to extraterrestrial miners after all.
"The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games." - Eugene Jarvis
I thought that elements heavier than iron were created in supernova explosions- have they been ruled out as a source? It seems like they are more common than "Two dead stars smashing into each other" would be. They're not even mentioned in TFA.
Try tracing the calcium in your bones to their origin. It's a very interesting flight of fancy:
"Calcium comes from stars. In fact, all of the elements that make up your body and the planet Earth itself, other than hydrogen and helium, were made in stars or during during explosions of massive stars." -- http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/teachers/calcium/got_calcium_litho.html
Bling!
Never claim "all" atoms of some type are from some specific thing. Thats pretty much always wrong. There will be some exceptions. Their are asteroids from far out side the solar-system, random fusion caused by a cosmic ray, man made, and decay products as other sources. Perhaps this explains 99.9999% or more, but certainly not "all" of the heavy elements on earth.
I know for a fact that humans have created a lot of heavy elements in labs and breeder reactors. This clearly falsifies the summery.
After the sun goes supernova in a. Couple of billion years, human (who are living in some other part of the universe, hopefully) we come back to what's left of earth and take all the precious metal.
I have read that gold deposits form near fault lines and volcanoes. For example http://www.ehow.com/info_8564326_characteristics-gold-deposits.html. What I am not clear about is if these pressures create gold atoms or whether they simply clump gold atoms together.
You blow up one sun and everyone expects you to walk on water!
To those who talk about this encouraging mining remember, the more you have a something the less valuable it tends to be. Sure gold has many industrial uses, but its main value is its perceived relative scarcity. Change that and you will essentially achieve the opposite of the alchemist's dream and turn gold into lead.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
how could they collide?
Ah needs me some bling bling!
In case anyone was wondering, Iron (Fe) is the limit to what is formed in convention fusion processes because any element heavier than iron takes more energy to fuse than is produced by the fusion. Iron and lighter fuse with an energy surplus, anything heavier requires an energy input and produces a deficit.
Direct source.
I really am starting to hate every site that links to secondary sites, that run an article on the original article from another site. Starting to think these sites are colluding for ad hits.
TFA gave a link to http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/colliding-exploding-stars-may-have-created-all-gold-earth , which led to another link at http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3960 , which I have dl-ed the PDF at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.3960v1.pdf? but no matter how I search, I couldn't find any mention of the word 'gold' anywhere
Can someone please point us to the real article, please ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...are you saying Earth was the victim of a planetary-scale golden shower at some point?
Dibs. Double dibs.
That little fart can do almost anything!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbler_%28Futurama%29#Nibbler
BS as in bad science!
BS as in bull s@#t!
Think for just a second ... and it won't even take that long. Earth seeded by a heavy metal like gamma burst; just how did we get heavy metals on the other side of the planet?
Oh Oh Oh ... pick me! there was another heavy metal like gamma burst on the other side of the planet by two more ...
never mind, I'll just chalk it it up to some twits 15 seconds of bad science.
Everyone's missed that the most important thing to be created in the universe is The Winslow.
http://www.rochesterfantasyfans.org/goodies/winslow1.jpg
And alchemists all over the world draw a sigh of dejection.
Waiting for you by the bridge
Rumplestiltskin! Rumplestiltskin! RUMPLESTILTSKIN!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Ok, but you cant prove this for sure, its like me saying that the diamonds could have been from a species that came to earth 100 million years ago when the earth was still in a stage of gas turning into solid, and introduced a special compound that started to form the diamonds inside the crust, and that was done purely to come back hundreds of millions of years later after all the humans had mined the diamonds and then take them without so much needing to mine themselves, and no one would be able to refute this as no one was there 100 million years ago to contest this claim.
I base this on what, probability that some intelligent species exist and could have thought of a pre-terra forming scheme like this.... I thought of it, so why could they have not? The probability of this not having happened is too great to just ignore it, but I know everyone will anyways because it cannot even be proven, much like the claim they make in this post.
The probability of two stars that are both dead smashing into each other is so unlikely, this is completely ridiculous. That's like making a pool shot from new york to LA blindfolded except a million times less likely and don't forget, they both have to be dead stars.
Bitcoin reference. Can't let a discussion of currency or precious metals go by without a reference that which is neither.
End the Fed! Invest in Colliding stars! Was Obama born in this Solar System?
Knock it off... I will just give you another grant for a similar study but you must promise to stop publishing this rubbish !
And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Going back to Hoyle and Fowler's famous paper of 1956 on nucleosynthesis in stars, the "heavy" elements, those heavier than Iron, needed to have some different process than can be run in ordinary stars to create them. This "r" process for rapid neutron capture builds necuiii greater then about mass of 60. For a long time the principle mechanism was thought to be nova and supernova explosions. I gather that the primary article is suggesting gamma ray bursts within our galaxy and before 4.6 BYA as the source for most of the heavy elements in our solar system, more precisely, the terrestrial and some meteoric abundances. It is possible that when galactic black holes have lots of matter to consume forming quasars, that the energy is high enough in the ejected matter in their polar jets, note M87 in Virgo, that heavy element synthesis is possible and at a greater efficiency than in supernovas. The problem with GRBs is that they must be pretty rare in one galaxy and so to cite them as a major contributor tp heavy element synthesis might be problematic when more common but lower energy alternatives might be available.
I don't know if heavy element spectra have been detected in quasar jets, or if they are sen in the light echos from GRBs. It may be that the energies are too high. Too much radiation and neutron flus would photodisintegrate heavy atoms. The flux would have to be just right.
If this is true then it is exciting news. But what I know is that it is created in a supernova explosion. New and new researches are modifying the existing concepts and we don’t know how far we have to go to have a definite view about this.
Dbaig
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