Ancient Neutron-Star Crash Made Enough Gold and Uranium to Fill Earth's Oceans

Space.com ^ | May 8, 2019 | Charles Q. Choi

[ETL]

Enough gold, uranium and other heavy elements about equal in mass to all of Earth's oceans likely came to the solar system from the collision of two neutron stars billions of years ago, a new study finds.

If the same event were to happen today, the light from the explosion would outshine the entire night sky, and potentially prove disastrous for life on Earth, according to the new study's researchers.

Recent findings have suggested that much of the gold and other elements heavier than iron on the periodic table was born in the catastrophic aftermath of colliding neutron stars, which are the ultradense cores of stars left behind after supernova explosions. 

"The first directly detected neutron-star merger happened 130 million light-years away, which may sound like a large distance, but was much closer than anticipated," study lead author Imre Bartos, an astrophysicist at the University of Florida, Gainesville, told Space.com.

"This made me and my colleagues think about how close to us such events might happen. Could they happen near the solar system?"

The researchers analyzed previous data from ancient meteorites whose origins date back to the early solar system, which formed about 4.6 billion years ago. They focused on traces of radioactive isotopes left in the meteorites that a neutron-star collision would have likely produced. (Isotopes of an element have different numbers of neutrons from each other.)

The kind of relatively short-lived radioactive isotopes a neutron-star merger would have generated are no longer present in the solar system. However, previous work deduced what byproducts would have resulted after those isotopes decayed over time.

The scientists analyzed the abundances of these byproducts in ancient meteorites in order to deduce when they were created, and thus when their parent isotopes might have entered the solar system. They also developed computer models of the Milky Way to see where a neutron-star collision might have occurred to seed the solar system with these isotopes.

The researchers found a vast amount of heavy elements in the solar system likely originated from a single neutron-star collision that occurred about 80 million years before the birth of the solar system.

Based on the amount of material from this merger that managed to make it here, they suggested this merger happened about 1,000 light-years from the cloud of gas and dust that eventually formed the solar system. (In comparison, the Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years in diameter.)

"We didn't expect that one event would contribute most of the heavy elements found in the early solar system," Bartos said.

This ancient neutron-star merger would have seeded the solar system with about 1.1 billion billion tons (1 billion billion metric tons) of these heavy elements, such that "in each of us, we would find an eyelash worth of these elements, mostly in the form of iodine, which is essential to life," Bartos said in a statement.

Other phenomena can generate elements heavier than iron on the periodic table, such as the stellar explosions known as supernovas. However, these would generate different patterns of elements than seen in ancient meteorites, Bartos said.

If this neutron-star merger were to happen today at the same distance from Earth, the researchers found that at the very least "it would be brighter than all the night sky put together — as bright as the crescent moon, squeezed into one point," Bartos said.

"It would be bright enough to be seen during daytime, brighter than anything but the sun. It would have lasted about a week."

However, if Earth had the misfortune to face either pole of the black hole that resulted from this neutron-star collision, it would prove a disaster. Soon after the merger occurred, a giant explosion known as a gamma-ray burst would erupt from the poles of the newborn black hole.

Although it would last only about a second, "the gamma-ray burst would emit more energy than the sun will radiate during its entire lifetime," Bartos said.

If the gamma-rays from such an outburst were to hit Earth, they would get absorbed by the upper atmosphere, generating ultraviolet rays.

"A nearby gamma-ray burst would result in a mass extinction," Bartos said.

"Luckily, neutron-star mergers only happen roughly every 100,000 years in the Milky Way, and ones that happen nearby do so less often, so we are not in any immediate danger in any way."

The scientists now want to investigate how often neutron-star mergers occurred in the past in the Milky Way "and understand how they influenced the evolution of the galaxy," Bartos said.

Bartos and his colleague Szabolcs Marka at Columbia University in New York detailed their findings online May 1 in the journal Nature.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“A one second gamma-ray burst would emit more energy than the sun will radiate during its entire lifetime”

Wow, that is incomprehensible.

[ETL]

Re: "“A one second gamma-ray burst would emit more energy than the sun will radiate during its entire lifetime”

Wow, that is incomprehensible.

As are several other things within the article.

"A neutron star is so dense that one teaspoon of its material would have a mass over... (900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza)"

"In the enormous gravitational field of a neutron star, that teaspoon of material would weigh 1.1×10^25 N (about 15 times what the Moon would weigh if it were placed on the surface of the Earth)"

"The entire mass of the Earth at neutron star density would fit into a sphere of 305m [~3 football fields wide] in diameter."

"Ancient Neutron-Star Crash Made Enough Gold and Uranium to Fill Earth's Oceans"

This last one of course is somewhat less certain than the others, but is probably not off by too much.

[dp0622]

I’ll get the shovel!

Just tell me where to start digging. :)

If only it were that easy.

Probably costs quite a bit to mine for the stuff these days.

[ETL]

Hey,
I meant to ping you to this thread, but forgot-about-it.

‘Italian Job’ Lamborghini Miura found after 50 years
FoxNews.com/auto ^ | May 11, 2019 | Gary Gastelu | Fox News

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3748793/posts

[dp0622]

VERY COOL!!

I don’t think my Challenger could keep up :)

If I had a thousand to blow very frivolously, I would rent one for a day.

[dp0622]

VERY COOL!!

I don’t think my Challenger could keep up :)

If I had a thousand to blow very frivolously, I would rent one for a day.

[thoughtomator]

More fraud passed on as physics. “Neutron stars” are another one of those mystical objects that can’t actually happen in reality. For a good laugh, try to figure out what it is alleged a “neutron star” is made of at how that works exactly at the subatomic level.

[Right Wing Assault]

Yeah.

$771 Trillion Worth Of Gold Lies Hidden In The Ocean: Good Luck Getting It

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/09/15/771-trillion-worth-gold-hidden-ocean/#32bc99f823d3

Also, if you could get even a fraction out, it’s value would drop to not much.

[jmcenanly]

If we were to find gold in those quantities,we would value good less as a medium of exchange of decoration, and more core it’s physical and chemical properties, such as conductivity.
At the turn of the last century, aluminum was a precious metal. With the introduction of the Bayer process, it is cheap enough to wrap leftovers.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks ETL.

· join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · subscribe ·

Google news searches: exoplanet · exosolar · extrasolar ·

[SunkenCiv]

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The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization by Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith

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[SunkenCiv]

Thanks ETL.

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join or quit view topics view or post blog bookmark post new topic subscribe

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[ETL]

You’re welcome.

[raybbr]

Sara Bareilles. “Cassiopeia “.

[Paul R.]

Fascinating!!

[SunkenCiv]

BTW, that's a *lot* of AU and U.

[Robert DeLong]

Well they had an advantage that gold mining in outer space would not enjoy. They merely had to come up with a method to reduce the extremely difficult & costly process to refine, and it was all but impossible to accomplish that on a mass production scale.

Gold miners in outer-space have to overcome the technical know how to build and launch rockets that can carry heavy payloads. In addition they need to transport the machinery needed to extract gold from planets. Then they have to figure out how to do this on a steady basis.

While aluminum was difficult to refine, it’s not a geological rarity, like gold. Aluminum is actually the most abundant element in the earth’s crust and the third-most common element, after oxygen and silicon, on the entire planet.

So the two, while similar, are miles apart in overcoming the obstacles they both faced. But you make my point exactly, when gold no longer becomes a rarity, like aluminum it will fall in price. Aluminum was at its high, 1,200.00 per kg. Forty years later it was worth just 1.00 per kg. 8>)