Dwarf galaxies contain all of gold, silver and platinum

An ancient dwarf galaxy nearly 100,000 light years from Earth contains stars full of precious metals like gold, silver and platinum.

The new discovery, published in the March 31 issue of the journal Nature, points to billions of years ago of precious metals like gold, silver, and platinum in the universe.

Scientists are searching for the origin of the most precious metals on Earth, including gold, silver and platinum, for nearly six decades. Precious metal elements often have large mass of atoms and are formed during fast neutron capture, denoted as R process , which requires large energy. Their appearance in the universe is still a great mystery.

Illustration of a neutron star vibrating.(Photo: NASA).

However, the discovery of an ancient dwarf galaxy called Reticulum II , about 98,000 light-years from Earth, could help explain this mystery. Reticulum II contains stars with enormous amounts of precious metals never seen before. "Understanding the process of forming heavy elements like gold, silver and platinum is one of the most difficult problems of nuclear physics," said physicist Anna Frebel from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). know.

According to Science Alert, by analyzing starlight from some of the brightest stars in the Reticulum II galaxy through the Magellan telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, Frebel and his colleagues realized they contained a large amount of weaknesses. But the problem is that stars cannot produce these elements themselves.

In 1957, two physicists Hans Suess and Harold Urey hypothesized that giant star explosions and collisions of neutron stars , where the critical conditions and an enormous amount of neutrons, would be too R program takes place. Until now, researchers have not been able to verify this hypothesis and the origin of the R process has not been answered.

At the beginning of the Reticulum II, many neutron star collisions occurred and followed the R. The result was a large amount of precious metals formed, confirming Suess and Urey's hypothesis about the origin of them.

Regarding the emergence of all precious metals, the products of the R process such as gold, silver, uranium, lead, platinum, on Earth, researchers believe that they were created in the explosion of neutron stars. They merged into the surface of the star or planet at that time, then brought to Earth in many ways.

"We speculate that gold was not created on asteroids that were born earlier in neutron star mergers , " Frebel said. "At that time, gold was mixed into clouds of gas and dust, all forming an asteroid."