The LIGO and Virgo detectors captured gravitational waves produced by the collision of two neutron stars 130 million light years from Earthwhich allowed verifying that this phenomenon produces as much gold as 13 times the mass of our planet.
According to the report published on the website of The Republicground-based and orbiting telescopes pointed in the same direction where the crash was recorded and managed to record images of the result, generated at the edge of the galaxy NGC 4993.
Scientists from the University of California – Berkeley observed that the color of the collision cloud was bluish, indicating the formation of light metals such as silver in the outermost layers.
Then, as the days passed, the glow turned red, meaning that the inner layers of the cloud were forming heavier elements, such as platinum, gold, and uraniumwhich also reconfirms that the origin of these materials is spatial.
a huge amount of gold
In this regard, a report published in The Astrophysical Journal determined that the event produced an amount of gold equivalent to three to 13 times the mass of the Earth.
In 2021, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of New Hampshire concluded that neutron star collisions were the main heavy element factory in the universe.
For their part, another team of experts tried to explain the abundance of heavy metals in the Solar System and highlighted that there was probably a merger of neutron stars 1,000 light years from our location, 80 million years before it was formed. the Sun and the planets.
In this way, the cloud that formed the Milky Way acquired the precious metals that we see today. In addition, the same research estimated that in our galaxy these cosmic events happen between one and 100 times per million years.
