This is according to a new study led by Ido Berger from the Howard Smithsonian Center for Astronomy who investigated the gamma ray burst that occurred in early June 2013
We value gold for many reasons: its beauty, its many uses in jewelry, and its rarity. Gold is rare on Earth, in part because it is a rare metal in the universe as a whole.
Unlike elements such as carbon or iron, it cannot be produced by a natural process that goes through every planet. This element must be formed in much more massive events, such as those that occurred last month in a brief gamma-ray burst (GRB) event. The observations of this eruption provided evidence of the formation of gold during a collision between two neutron stars - the dead cores of stars that had previously exploded as supernovae.
Moreover, a glow that lasted for several days in the place where the gamma ray burst occurred, may indicate the creation of a large amount of heavy elements, including gold.
"We estimate that the amount of gold that is created and emitted during the merger of two neutron stars may be 10 times greater than the mass of the moon - a lot of gold" says lead researcher Ido Berger from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts (CfA).
A gamma ray burst is a flash of high-energy light (gamma rays) from an extremely powerful explosion. Most of these explosions occur in the deep universe. Berger and his colleagues studied GRB 130603B which occurred 'only' 3.9 billion light years from Earth - one of the relatively close bursts observed so far.
A gamma ray burst comes in two forms - long or short depending on the duration of the gamma ray flash. 130603B, discovered by NASA's Swift satellite on June 3, lasted less than two-tenths of a second.
Although the gamma rays disappear quickly, 130603B also showed a slow-fading glow, consisting mostly of infrared light. Its brightness and behavior did not match the usual post-eruption glow produced when a jet of fast particles collides with other bodies in the environment. Instead, the glow appears to be emitted from exotic radioactive elements. The neutron-rich material ejected by the collision of neutron stars may create such elements, which undergo radioactive decay and glow predominantly in the infrared range, and this is exactly what the team discovered.
"We were looking for a 'smoking gun' that would link a short burst of gamma rays with the collision of neutron stars. The radioactive glow from GRB 130603B may be the smoking gun," explains Wen-Pai Fong, PhD student at CfA and co-author of the paper.
The team calculated that materials equivalent to a hundredth of the mass of the sun were emitted in the gamma ray burst, some of them gold atoms. By combining the estimate of the amount of gold created in one short gamma ray burst, with the number of bursts that have occurred in the years of the universe's existence, it turns out that all the gold in the universe could have come from a gamma ray burst.
"To paraphrase Carl Sagan's words, we are made of stellar material, and our jewelry is material created in a stellar collision," says Berger.
8 תגובות
skeptic
A. One of the biggest and earliest successes of the big bang model is "nucleosynthesis" (Gamov and Alper in the 40s). This model predicts well the composition of the elements in the early universe - it is very acceptable and agrees well with observational data. According to this model, no elements heavier than beryllium were created in the Big Bang, which means that gold is really not in the right direction. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis#Heavy_elements)
B. Creating heavy elements from iron is very problematic - in the big bang only light elements were created, mainly hydrogen and helium. In stars, these elements undergo fusion processes, creating heavier elements and emitting energy. All this can continue up to iron because iron and above requires fusion and energy investment and therefore there is no reason for it to happen.
This means that the formation of heavy elements (gold for example) requires extreme circumstances and there are two main candidates: supernovae and neutron star collisions.
In a supernova, nuclei are thrown together at hysterical speeds and this may create heavy elements (this also happens for sure, since a supernova has radiation that comes from radioactive decays, which indicates the creation of heavy elements).
The second way is by colliding neutron stars. In the shell of neutron stars there is a hysterical pressure and density which means that very heavy elements of hundreds of nucleons become the stable thing. When two neutron stars collide with each other, these elements are blown away and fade into more conventional elements such as gold (in principle you wouldn't need a neutron star collision if you would have found another way for material from the mantle to leave the neutron star).
Both of these mechanisms could theoretically create gold. The question of which of these two mechanisms is more relevant to the creation of gold requires delving into technical details of nuclear physics that is beyond my understanding.
third. The matter of the Earth is really irrelevant - no one thinks that the origin of the gold on the Earth is from the supernovae that exploded after the Earth was created, because the amount of material that is blown up and reaches the Earth is really tiny. The gold originated in supernovae that preceded the solar system and it is true - most of it sank into the Earth but some remained on the rim.
Typo in my last message:
Instead of "shell of a ball" it should have been written "shell of the earth".
deer
Do you think gold was created in the universe only by collapsing into neutron stars of binary stars or in some other way?
I have a gut feeling that the gold in the universe was mostly created in other ways, perhaps very energetic events at the dawn of the current universe (events that don't happen much in the "mature" age of the current universe).
According to what I am guessing - the study attributes the reality of the gold on the shell of a sphere to the collapses as above because it is difficult to attribute the reality of the gold on the shell as part of the solidification of the earth. It is difficult to relate the reality of the gold on the shell because the gold, which is very heavy, is supposed to sink for the most part into the core of the earth in the process of solidification. Please, your opinion on this.
Orit,
The probability of neutron stars colliding is not zero at all since the direction is not random - they attract each other.
About half of the stars in the world live in pairs. Also, large stars tend to be paired with other large stars (such as those that will produce neutron stars) and therefore a significant fraction of the neutron stars will reach the stage where they live in a pair with another neutron star.
Two neutron stars orbiting each other tend to lose energy due to the emission of gravitational radiation - which causes them to approach each other. In fact, the best evidence for gravitational radiation comes from the observation of the approach of two neutron stars to each other - incredibly reliable evidence for which the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 1993.
This is how the neutron stars get closer to each other and will eventually collide with each other in an event similar to the one described here. These events are certainly reasonable and are the most accepted explanation for the short GRB phenomenon (this type of event is discussed here).
incidentally,
It is very important to note that the event in question did not happen in our region at all (certainly not in our galaxy as you hinted),
3.9 billion light years is about 2000 times the distance to the nearest galaxy to us, that is, in the space between us to this point there is probably an SDG of about a billion galaxies - even in cosmological terms this is really not the immediate environment.
All the money in the world is a psychological matter, and gold does have a connection to science and technology.
The price of gold depends on the fact that it is rare, and cannot be duplicated, unlike money that can be printed without limits.
His weak points are:
The difficulty of trading it, because of the difficulty of estimating its price due to weight and carat.
Turning gold into worthless toilet paper, traded on the stock exchange, and printed from nothing.
The probability of neutron stars colliding is zero due to their small size.
The chance is billions of times smaller than the chance that two rifle bullets fired from the moon and from Mars will hit each other if each is fired at random.
It's not something that doesn't happen, but it happens during the life of a galaxy a discrete number of times and the galaxy is so big that the chances of it actually happening near us are zero
It is more likely that the source of the gold is different
The price of gold is a psychological matter and has nothing to do with this or that scientific matter.
If the majority decide one day that we are done with the brainwashing about the prestige of gold then the price of gold will collapse.