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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.
.. 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.
Supernova nucleosynthesis is still the main mechanism for creation of elements heavier than Fe. The guys report that they think other type of events may lead to the creation of heavy elements and they believe we already witnessed such an event
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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
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...
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.
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 !
There's about a lunar mass of gold in my Madoff fund potfolio.
Oh, wait a minute, that's out of date. I need to see how the fund has been doing recently. Anyone know how to look up that listing?
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
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.