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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.
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
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!
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.
Most of the gold that was originally part of the Earth at the time of formation is actually sitting at or near the core at this point, due to its density. It's believed that most gold that we mine right now is actually from meteorites. Obviously, any gold in the crust from those impacts can be melted and brought to the surface by volcanism, which is why you'll also find gold and heavy metals near volcanic areas and sites of impacts.
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.
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 !
Human made elements are expensive in cost and energy use but as far as I know they never create them legitimately. What we do is take super-nova scale energy investments in existing elements and nudge them into becoming a different element. We don't turn energy into mass yet do we?
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...are you saying Earth was the victim of a planetary-scale golden shower at some point?
Sorry. Our sun is too small.
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.
it doesn't even take a supernova, half of the mass of elements with greater atomic number than iron are produced by the "s-process", which is neutron capture followed by beta-minus decay into proton.
In supernova collapse there is the much faster "r-process" capture of neutrons making heavy elements
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.
It's basically carried up from deeper in the Earth and concentrated by hydrothermal systems associated with the fault zones and volcanism. It's more like it's precipitated, not actually formed there.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold.
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Not to get picky, because I myself tend to over generalize words too. But the context in this case is CLEAR and context is what saves us from having trouble when we take away 1/3 of english vocab to redundancy brought on by simplification of word definitions.
Exploding stars create matter from energy. Literally create. Not produce or make, which vaguely are synonyms for create. You can slap a sticker on something old and call it a new creation, or make it new or produce something new - all the same. but the context was creating new elements from scratch not producing new elements by tweaking old ones. (which have a LOT invested in them already. I could blow a building over using my lungs! ...The building would have to be at the edge of collapse, now I could claim credit in one sense and in another it would be comical to make such a claim.)
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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.