It’s raining a bit Gold Across the universe. But no one knows what it is.
The problem is here: the gold is a Material, Which means you can’t make it through the general Chemical reactions – Although Calcest Tried for centuries. To make a shiny metal, you need to bind 79 protons and 118 neutrons together to form a single unit. Atomic nucleus. It is an intensive atom Consolidation Feedback. But this kind of intense friction doesn’t happen very often, at least not because we have to make gold giant travails. Earth And elsewhere The solar system. And a new study has found the most-theoretical source of gold – the collision between neutron stars – cannot even explain the abundance of gold. So where is the gold coming from? There are a few more possibilities, including supernovae that cause them to put a star inside. Unfortunately, even such a bizarre phenomenon cannot explain how the local universe has faded, as new research has shown.
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Neutron star collisions make gold by scattering protons and neutrons together briefly in the atomic nucleus, then forming that newly-bound heavy nucleus all over space. Regular supernovae can’t explain the universe’s gold because they can fuse large amounts of gold before they die – which is rare – they become black holes in explosions, said Chiaki Kobashi, an astronomer at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK and led a new research author. And, in regular supernovae, that gold sucks in black holes.
So what about that weird, star-reversing supernova? This type of star explosion, a so-called magnetic-rotating supernova, “is a very rare supernova, spinning very fast,” Kobayashi told Live Science.
During a magnetic-rotating supernova, a dying star spins so fast and is covered by a strong magnetic field that it turns itself in as soon as it explodes. As it dies, the star fires white-hot jets into space. And because the star has turned inside out, its jets are full of gold nuclei. It is rare for them to fuse gold. The stars that fuse gold then spell it into space are even rarer.
But even neutron stars plus magneto-rotational supernovae cannot explain the Earth’s golden bananas together, Kobayashi and his colleagues found.
“There are two levels to this question,” he said. “Number one is that neutron star attachment is not enough. Number two: with the second source we still can’t explain the amount of gold observations.”
Past studies have shown that neutron star collisions reveal golden fountains. But these studies were not responsible for the rarity of these conflicts. Tiny neutron stars – they are super-dense remnants of ancient supernovae – are hard to estimate accurately how often they slam together. But this is certainly not very common: scientists have only seen it happen once. Even rough estimates show that they do not often collide to produce all the gold found in the solar system, Kobayashi and his co-authors have found.
“There are two levels to this question,” he said. “Number one is that neutron star attachment is not enough. Number two: with the second source we still can’t explain the amount of gold observations.”
Past studies have shown that neutron star collisions reveal golden fountains. But these studies were not responsible for the rarity of these conflicts. Tiny neutron stars – they are super-dense remnants of ancient supernovae – are hard to estimate accurately how often they slam together. But this is certainly not very common: scientists have only seen it happen once. Even rough estimates show that they do not often collide to produce all the gold found in the solar system, Kobayashi and his co-authors have found.
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“This paper did not at first suggest that neutron star collisions are not sufficient to explain the abundance of gold,” said Ian Roder, an astronomer at the University of Michigan who has discovered rare elements in distant stars.
However, a new paper by Kobashi and his colleagues, published September 15 Astrophysical Journal, It has a big advantage: it is absolutely perfect, Roder said. The researchers poured information on top of a mountain and plugged it into rigid models of how the galaxy evolved and created new chemicals.
“This paper contains references to 341 other publications, three times more than the general research papers in astrophysical journals today,” Rodera told Live Science.
To pull all the information together in an effective way, he said, “Herculean effort” to
Using this method, the authors were able to explain the structure of atoms as light Carbon-12 (six protons and six neutrons) and as heavy Uranium-238 (92 protons and 146 neutrons). This is an impressive range, Roder said, that this type of study usually ignores elements that are usually overlooked.
In most cases, the math works.
Neutron star collisions formed strontium in their model, for example. That match Observation of strontium in space Scientists have observed directly after a neutron star collides.
Explains the presence of magnetic-rotating supernovae Europium In their model, another atom that has proved stingy to explain in the past.
But gold remains a mystery.
Kwabashi said that scientists do not know that there is something that needs to be made of gold. Or is it possible that neutron star collisions make way more gold than suggested by existing models. In either case, astronomers still have a long way to go before they can figure out where all the fancy balling came from.
Originally published in Live Science.
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