Your gold jewelry may have been mined from the earth, but long before that, it could’ve been forged by a particularly violent dead star 13 billion years ago.
Your gold ring, your gold grills, and the custom gold-plated knob in your Lambo might be the byproduct of a magnetar. That’s a type of neutron star that’s known to belch out massive plumes of energy on par with the amount of energy our sun produces in 150,000 years.
Scientists went back and re-examined one such flare from 2004 from one of these super-dense, magnetic neutrons. They think they’ve found the galactic evidence of the birth of heavy elements.
This “starquake” spat out enough gamma radiation to light up deep space. The European Space Agency’s retired INTEGRAL observatory caught it on tape way back when Outkast’s “Hey Ya” was tearing up the charts. Nobody realized what they had until a Columbia grad student named Anirudh Patel ran some updated simulations and probably shouted whatever the 2020s version of “Eureka!” is.
Where Does Gold Come From?
Until now, scientists thought most of the universe’s gold, platinum, and uranium came from neutron star mergers, which is when two stars smash into each other. But those collisions are rare and tend to happen later in the universe’s timeline. Magnetars are much more likely to have been an early contributor to our current supply of gold.
The team’s findings suggest that when magnetars have their little starquakes, a rapid neutron-capture process, called “r-process,” might be responsible for spitting out heavy elements into the universe. That forgotten 2004 gamma-ray fit the theory like a snug glove.
If all this turns out to be exactly how gold came into existence, NASA’s 2027 COSI mission will be able to confirm it.
Until then, try to squeeze a few more dollars out of that gold necklace you’re pawning by telling the guy that it’s not just any kind of gold, it was meticulously crafted by a violent burping star billions of years ago.
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