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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 suspect that the concern of heavy elements being supernova products has to do with the short duration of the event, the perceived amount of time needed to generate the heavey elements involved, and the apparent distribution of heavy elements compared to the percieved age of the universe. Additionally while supernova events are not likely to be the sources of the high volume of grb events that are being detected. So what would be the products of grb's, and what are the likely causes of the events in the first place, if you eliminate the possibility of a grb being the result of supernova events even larger than what we think is the maximum, you end up having to look at other types of events, stars coliding with each other, dead stars coliding with each other, dead stars coliding with Neutron Stars, Neutron stars coliding with each other, dead stars with neutron stars, stars, dead stars, or neutron stars coliding with black holes, and black holes colliding with each other. Any of these collisions are possible, though of these the most probable are stars with stars, stars with dead stars, and dead stars with dead stars, as the perception is that small stars are far more frequent than stars large enough to collapse in a supernova.
As far as why to link to Networkworld.com, I suspect that the submitter couldn't find a better source.
You never know...
Wouldn't the abundance of a semi-scarce highly useful industrial product be a net gain for society? Malleable, resistant to corrosion, excellent conductivity, low melting point. Not obtaining more of a useful material in order to maintain scarcity seems counter-productive.