Gold on Earth may come from dead stars

Researchers at Harvard University (USA) on July 17 said a strange light source in the universe has provided new evidence that all the gold on Earth is formed by the death between the dead stars. .

Using the ground telescope and the Hubble space telescope, the team led by Edo Berger of the Smithsonian Astrophysics Center of Harvard School led the discovery of a strange light that exists every day, after sudden burst of gamma rays in the universe.

Through analyzing the infrared light of this light, the team hypothesized that heavy elements such as gold were created from the cosmic explosion.

Astronomers have long known that molten reactions in stars' cores produce light elements such as carbon and oxygen, but cannot produce heavy elements like gold.

Instead, they thought that gold was made from star explosions or supernova phenomenon. However, this has not fully explained the amount of precious metals in our solar system.

About 10 years ago, a group of European researchers used supercomputers and hypothesized that gold, platinum and other heavy metals could be formed when two foreign neutron stars collided or matched. Best. Basically, neutron stars are often the core of big stars that have been broken.

Last June, NASA's telescope detected a sudden burst of gamma rays after the explosion of dead stars. This phenomenon occurs in distant galaxies, about 3.9 billion light-years from Earth and only lasts less than a second.

Currently, telescopes have detected explosions like above and observations that have proven to the point that gold in our jewelry was formed in such rare explosions before the Solar System. formed about 4 billion years ago.

It is thought that in the galaxy every 100,000 years, this phenomenon occurs once. Berger said it is unlikely that this phenomenon occurs in our galaxy in a lifetime, but satellites can detect these phenomena once in a month in distant galaxies. sticky.

According to the celestial physicist Stephan Roswog of Stockholm University (Sweden), it is necessary to observe more gamma ray phenomena in the universe, but it is likely to show the fusion of neutron stars as "cauldron big "create gold.

This new finding will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Previously, many studies have hypothesized that meteor shower may have turned gold and other precious metals to Earth.