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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."
TFA/TFS is misleading. The reported discovery:
* is not about gold can be created only by the collision of two stars (the supernova nucleosynthesis is still another channel, very probable the main one)
* is not about gold on Earth being originated in the collision of two start
* is about the collision of a neutron star which, besides producing a gamma-ray burst (due to acceleration of charged particles), have shown an afterglow characteristic to decays of "too neutron rich" nuclei into more stable elements (gold included)
Besides, the authors are not even sure
"We've been looking for a 'smoking gun' to link a short gamma-ray burst with a neutron star collision. The radioactive glow from GRB 130603B may be that smoking gun," said Wen-fai Fong, a graduate student at the CfA and a co-author of the paper.
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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.