Columbia University | 2019 May 07
Columbia University and University of Florida astrophysicists find signs of cosmic event that created elements that sent gold and silver to Earth
Astrophysicists Szabolcs Márka at Columbia University and Imre Bartos (GSAS’12) at the University of Florida have identified a violent collision of two neutron stars 4.6 billion years ago as the likely source of some of the most coveted matter on Earth.
This single cosmic event, close to our solar system, gave birth to 0.3 percent of the Earth’s heaviest elements, including gold, platinum and uranium. ...
To arrive at their conclusion, Bartos and Márka compared the composition of meteorites to numerical simulations of the Milky Way. They found that a single neutron-star collision could have occurred about 100 million years before the formation of Earth, in our own neighborhood, about 1,000 light years from the gas cloud that eventually formed the Solar System. ...
A nearby neutron-star merger explains the actinide abundances in the early Solar System ~ Imre Bartos, Szabolcs Marka
- Nature 569(7754):85 (02 May 2019) DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1113-7 (pdf)