Merging neutron stars flung out gold - a lot of gold.

Merging neutron stars flung out gold – a lot of gold.

Researchers have new evidence that gold comes from the collision of neutron stars.

Neutron stars collide because gravitational radiation steals the energy from their orbit, said Stan Woosley, astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“We can account for all the gold in the universe from these collisions,” said Edo Berger, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithson Center for Astrophysics.

Berger estimates that the equivalent of 10 moon masses of gold are created and ejected when two neutron stars merge. At today’s market rate, that would go for about 10 octillion dollars, he said. That’s a 1 followed by 28 zeros.

Platinum and uranium also come from this collision process, Woosley said. All of these elements swirl around between stars, as gases, and eventually become part of subsequent generations of stars, like our sun.

“The gold and platinum in our rings as well as the uranium in our bombs and reactors are little pieces of neutron stars that merged in our galaxy long before the sun was born,” Woosley said.

Gold in Earth's core & close to surface

This same gold from space became part of the formation of Earth and the rest of the solar system, including the sun.Gold that was present in the Earth’s formation sank to its core. 

But we have gold that can be mined closer to the planet’s surface because meteorites brought it later, according to a 2011 study in the journal Nature. More than 200 million years after the planet was formed, a shower of meteorites hit and brought with them gold, which stayed in the planet’s mantle.

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Ms Naresh kuwar