Originally posted on Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013
Smithsonian Magazine reports a fascinating new scientific theory as to where gold originated: colliding stars.
Artist rendering by Dana Berry courtesy of NASA
On June 3, 3.9 billion light-years away, two incredibly dense neutron stars— bodies that are each about 1.5 times the mass of the sun but just the size of mere cities—collided. Scientists studying the event say it solves an enduring mystery about the formation of elements in our universe.
“It’s a very fast, catastrophic, extremely energetic type of explosion…. The flash, which lasted for only two-tenths of a second, was picked up by NASA’s Swift satellite and sent astronomers scrambling to collect data.
… Today, Berger and colleagues announced at a press conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that their analysis reveals that neutron star collisions are responsible for the formation of virtually all the heavy elements in the universe—a list that includes gold, mercury, lead, platinum and more.
“This question of where elements like gold come from has been around for a long time,” Berger says. Though many scientists had long argued that supernova explosions were the source, he says his team … have evidence that supernovas aren’t necessary. These neutron star collisions produce all elements heavier than iron, he says, “and they do it efficiently enough that they can account for all the gold that’s been produced in the universe.”
The team’s conclusion, which was also published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, is that these events are a sufficient explanation for all of our heavy elements, including gold. After it’s created in these sorts of collisions and ejected outward, the heavy elements are eventually incorporated into the formation of future stars and planets. Which means that all the gold on Earth, even the gold in your wedding ring, probably comes from the collision of two distant stars.
As Joni Mitchell once wrote and sang in the immortal anthem Woodstock:
We are stardust. Billion year old carbon.
We are golden. Caught in the Devil’s bargain.
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
And since Goethe, in Faust, Part II, presents fiduciary money …
as the quintessential Devil’s bargain… perhaps …
Joni’s prophecy contains more literal truth than we knew.
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