The Colliding Neutron Star Leaves a Lot of Gold and Platinum

The hot, dense, and expanding cloud of debris that was stripped from the neutron star before the neutron star collided. The collision between two dense objects such as two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole is called a thousand novae. NASA's Thousand Nova illustrations show clouds in visible and infrared light.

In the neutron-rich debris after the collision, a large number of some of the heaviest elements on earth are produced. The most surprising thing is that there are hundreds of earth-mass gold and platinum in that fragment cloud. Most people are familiar with the term supernova, which refers to a huge explosion produced by a star much larger than the sun. A supernova explosion is the largest explosion known to man. Although a thousand novae are not as bright as a supernova, the brightness of a thousand novae can be 1000 times higher than that of the nova produced when a white dwarf explodes. Thousand novae are the main source of gold in the universe, and neutron stars are stellar corpses produced by supernovae. They are the extremely dense shells left behind after stars explode. They are mainly composed of neutrons and are about ten miles wide. Although they are very small, they have the mass of the entire star, which makes them have a strong magnetic field in a tiny volume, larger than the sun. Scientists say that a teaspoon of neutron star material weighs 1 billion tons. The only thing that can prevent neutron stars from killing themselves to form black holes is the extreme pressure that quantum mechanics prevents the collapse of neutron stars. Scientists were able to see the aftermath of the collision of a pair of neutron stars earlier this year. On August 17, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and the Virgo Gravitational-Wave Observatory detected signals from a galaxy named NGC 4493 located 130 million light-years away. Collision signal.