The golden explosion
Crock of gold heavier than Earth produced by two stars colliding
SCIENTISTS yesterday discovered a vast supply of gold ... on the far side of the universe.
The extraordinary hoard is the result of a huge collision between two ultra-dense neutron stars.
The resulting gravitational waves and radiation flash were picked up by powerful detectors and telescopes on Earth and in orbit.
The explosion happened 130million years ago in the Hydra constellation, which is so far away that the light and the ripples in space and time have only just reached us.
The gold created by the blast is estimated to weigh more than the whole of the Earth’s mass. Huge quantities of platinum, uranium and other heavy elements such as lead were also created.
‘Nature has given us the most dazzling gift,’ said Professor Sheila Rowan of the University of Glasgow. ‘The first gravitational wave signals from colliding neutron stars are a key that has allowed us to unlock the door to answer several long-standing mysteries.
‘One of these is the puzzle of where some of the gold and other heavy elements in the cosmos have come from. We now believe the violent collision of neutron stars could be a gold factory.’
Based on the observations, sci- entists calculate that colliding neutron stars could account for half the gold and other heavy elements in the universe.
The burned- out remnants of giant stars are so dense – only 12 miles across – that a teaspoon of their material on Earth would weigh a billion tons. The gravita- tional waves caused by the Hydra collision fanned out across the universe at the speed of light. They were picked up on Earth by sensitive detectors in Washington and Louisiana in the US, operated by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
It was here that the discovery of gravitational waves was made in September 2015, confirming a prediction made by Albert Einstein 100 years ago and earning the three pioneers of the project a Nobel Prize.
Two seconds after the initial detection, a burst of gamma rays from the neutron star collision was captured by Nasa’s Fermi space telescope. A third facility near Pisa in Italy also registered a faint signal, allowing scientists to triangulate the location.