Thanks to Stephen Cook 'down-under' for this post. He's Golden...DT the ET
Stephen - Gold has symbolized power and wealth since…well,
forever. It has true galactic value for its medicinal and healing
qualities and is about to be reborn as the solid base for the new
financial system. So we’re going to be seeing, enjoying and
experiencing a lot more of this beautiful element now we’re in the
Golden Age…
I particularly found the last line of this article both glowingly
ironic (yes, this planet really does have a heart of gold!) and a
possible nod to our ‘blue and green ball’ not being as ‘solid’ as we’ve
been ‘educated’ to believe.
Origin of Gold Found in Rare Neutron-Star Collisions
By Joel Achenbach, The Washinton Post – July 18, 2013
http://tinyurl.com/kl2hmak
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An artist’s impression of two neutron stars colliding. Photo: NASA |
For many years, scientists had theorised that the heavy elements of the periodic table, such as gold, platinum, lead and uranium, had their origin in supernova explosions. But the source, scientists announced on Wednesday, might be even more exotic: the collision of two ultra-dense objects called neutron stars.
If platinum is your thing, then rejoice: These collisions create seven times as much platinum as gold.
“We now have kind of a smoking gun,” said Edo Berger, an astronomer who led the research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.
The elements on Earth are all of cosmic origin. Carbon and oxygen atoms in our bodies, for example, come from the interior of stars, where they were formed under high pressure and heat. They were later spewed into the universe in supernova explosions. It is literally true, as Carl Sagan was fond of saying, that we are all star stuff.

The neutron stars might provide the explanation.
Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of stars that have exploded in a supernova. A neutron star might be roughly the diameter of Washington but contain as much mass as our sun, all of it crammed together by the force of gravity, until even the atoms have collapsed, leaving the object with the density of an atomic nucleus.
A teaspoon full of neutron-star material would weigh, on Earth, about 5 billion tonnes, Berger said.
Most of these cosmic fruitcakes are solitary wanderers, but some are paired up, as remnants of binary stars. They will orbit a common point in space and gradually drift closer and closer, spiralling towards one another in obedience to Einstein’s laws of general relativity. One day, they will collide.
In the Milky Way galaxy, with hundreds of billions of stars, such a neutron-star collision is likely to happen about once every 100,000 years, Berger said.

Astronomers scrambled to re-observe that tiny patch of space with a powerful telescope in Chile and with the Hubble Space Telescope.
They saw something glowing where they’d earlier seen... the GRB.
After comparing their observations with theoretical models, the astronomers concluded that they were seeing the radioactive afterglow from a huge quantity of heavy metals formed by a neutron-star smashup.
This observation potentially explains this type of short-duration GRB. These flashes of light can briefly outshine an entire galaxy. The June event, in a galaxy 3.9 billion light-years away, lasted only two-tenths of a second.
Although neutron-star collisions had been proposed as a source of such GRBs, now there is a direct observation.

And these explosions make a lot of it – about 20 Earth-masses of gold in the June event, according to a back-of-the-envelope calculation by Daniel Kasen, a University of California at Berkeley astrophysicist. Kasen said that comes out to about 100 trillion oil tankers of gold.
“You need a lot of neutrons to throw at some seed nucleus to build it up to something heavy like gold or lead or platinum,” Kasen said. “I’m partial to the name ‘blingnova’ to describe this kind of event, since what we are seeing is basically an ostentatious glimmering of riches.”
If platinum is your thing, then rejoice: These collisions create seven times as much platinum as gold. Berger said the neutron-star collisions produce essentially everything up and down the periodic table.
There’s still a lot that must be done with those gold atoms before they wind up on someone’s front tooth. The gold is basically dust in the wind, atomised, until it winds up in a cloud of material that can coalesce, through the force of gravity, into a solar system of planets with a star at the centre.

“It’s a process of distillation. That’s what planets do,” said Robert Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Gold is rare on Earth – about one part per billion in the Earth’s crust, Hazen said.
Most of Earth’s gold is trapped in the planet’s core, he said. And, he added, there’s a long-standing conjecture that at the very centre of the Earth is a small core that’s pure gold.
So, does Earth have a heart of gold? They haven’t found a way to check on that – yet.
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