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Small as they are per cosmic standards, <keyword id="1628473" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="neutron" source="Orion">neutron</keyword> stars make up for their size with their density. Just a teaspoon of these remnants of colossal supergiant stars would weigh a staggering 10 million tons here on <keyword id="6359982" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="earth" source="Orion">Earth</keyword>! <br /><br />But what happens when two such neutron stars bump into each other and decide to romance each other? Well they set off a dazzling display of light, known as a <keyword id="5899830" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="kilonova" source="Orion">kilonova</keyword>, marking one of the most violent events in the known universe. <em>Talk about explosive chemistry!</em><br /><br />However, detecting such an encounter is akin to finding a needle in a cosmic haystack. Only one kilonova resulting from the collision of neutron stars has been documented to date: in 2017, gravitational wave signal GW 170817 was detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (<keyword id="6562538" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="ligo" source="Orion">LIGO</keyword>), along with its accompanying gamma-ray burst GRB 170817A. This exceptional event occurred at a distance of 130 million light-years away.<br /><br />Remarkably, we can detect these waves on Earth, even after they've traversed billions of light-years. But very recently, a team of scientists decided to explore the hypothetical possibility of such a kilonova occurring much closer to our planet, say a mere 36 light years away. And it would be an understatement to say that the aftermath would be catastrophic for Earth.<br /><br />These celestial encounters unleash a torrent of destructive forces, including gamma rays and cosmic rays – high-energy charged particles moving at near-light speeds – in mind-boggling quantities. <br /><br />The most immediate peril from a <keyword id="1606019" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="neutron-star" source="Orion">neutron star</keyword> merger comes from the gamma rays they unleash. These high-energy rays can strip electrons from atoms, a process known as ionisation, and in the process, obliterate Earth's protective <keyword id="6533840" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="ozone-layer" source="Orion">ozone layer</keyword>. However, for this grim scenario to unfold, our planet must find itself directly in the crosshairs of the gamma-ray jets. Fortunately, this is a relatively localised effect.<br /><br />However, the true disaster would arise from highly energetic charged particles, aptly named cosmic rays. Should these particles find their way to Earth, they would mercilessly strip away our ozone layer, rendering our planet vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation for thousands of years! In essence, this could transform Earth into an inhospitable wasteland.<br /><br />Before you start stockpiling canned food and constructing underground bunkers, it's essential to grasp the rarity of such an event. Neutron star mergers are not only uncommon but also have a limited range of lethality. In the grand scheme of things, we have more immediate cosmic perils to contemplate, such as solar flares, asteroid impacts, and supernova explosions. While neutron star mergers make for a captivating thought experiment, these other cosmic threats demand our immediate attention.<br />

Neutron star collision can annihilate Earth’s ozone layer, leaving it devoid of life for thousands of years

<ul class="summary-list"><li>The James Webb Space Telescope picked up the blast from two neutron stars colliding.</li><li>The blast, called a kilonova, created the perfect conditions to make space gold and platinum. </li></ul><p>NASA's <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jwst-captures-oldest-strand-cosmic-web-linking-galaxies-2023-7">James Webb Space Telescope</a> (JWST) has detected two neutron stars crashing into each other so violently, it could have created gold in space.</p><p>The rare cosmic explosion is known as a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/neutron-stars-crash-ligo-gravitational-waves-periodic-elements-2017-10?r=US&amp;IR=T">kilonova</a> and is so powerful it can create gold, platinum, and uranium in the universe.</p><p>If confirmed, the findings would be the first time JWST has detected an explosion of this type. </p><h2>The death of two neutron stars</h2><div type="image" title="An artist's impressino of a kilonova" height="338" width="450" msid="101668878" hostid="261"></div><p>A kilonova happens when two neutron stars  — collapsed supermassive stars — <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gravitational-waves-new-class-of-collision-neutron-stars-2020-1">gravitate</a> around one another and eventually crash. An artist's illustration of the event is shown above. </p><p>The impact lets off a powerful blast called a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/brightest-cosmic-explosion-gamma-ray-record-weirder-than-first-thought-2023-6">gamma-ray burst</a>, followed by a wave of ultraviolet, infrared, and X-ray energy. </p><p>The energy let off by the blast can be detected by remote sensors on Earth and in space. This particular blast, called GRB 230307A, was first detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on March 7, 2023, <a href="https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-kilonova-neutron-stars">per</a> Space.com.</p><p>But for the first time, scientists think they have also managed to spot the signature of the blast using JWST's <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-james-webb-hidden-details-infrared-galaxies-2022-7">infrared capabilities</a>, allowing them to trace the signal back to the source of the gamma-ray burst. </p><p>They also spotted evidence of heavy elements being released by the blast, suggesting it was a kilonova.</p><p>The findings were published on the pre-print server <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.02098.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">arXiv</a> on July 5. </p><h2>Gold forged from stars</h2><div type="image" title="On display at Agosi AG in Pforzheim is a gold bar that weighs 12.5 kilograms (400 ounces), has a fine gold content of 99.99 percent and lies on gold granules." height="3745" width="4993" msid="101668879" hostid="261"></div><p>Virtually every element was created in a star. That's because the Big Bang only created helium, hydrogen, and lithium. More complex elements like carbon and oxygen had to be forged by the <a href="https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question57.html#:~:text=This%20is%20the%20process%20that,iron%20and%20nickel%20are%20formed." target="_blank" rel="noopener">million-degree fusion reactions</a> created by stars (so human bodies are made of star stuff). </p><p>But heavy elements like gold and uranium require extreme and violent conditions to be created. These only arise in very limited circumstances, like when two neutron stars collide. </p><p>In this particular case, the scientists detected traces of the heavy element tellurium and the creation of lanthanides, per Space.com.</p><h2>JWST continues to impress </h2><p>JWST has been sending images from space for almost a year. If confirmed, this would add one more achievement to the space telescope's <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-best-images-from-first-year-2022-12">ground-breaking observations. </a></p><p>Lead author Andrew Levan of Radboud University in the Netherlands told Insider the findings are being reviewed by peers, meaning the interpretation of the study could still change. </p>

NASA's James Webb telescope spotted two stars crashing into each other so violently it could have created gold in space

<ul class="summary-list"><li>A blinding burst of blue light flashing from seemingly empty space is puzzling astronomers. </li><li>Scientists had previously thought Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients were caused by dying stars.</li></ul><p>A <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/huge-cosmic-burst-two-circling-black-holes-study-2023-6">bright flash</a> of blue light appearing in the middle of seemingly empty space has scientists confused.</p><p>The brilliant flash — thought to have burned at about 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit —is a rare explosion known as a Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient (LFBOT). These are some of the brightest and most unpredictable known visible-light events in the universe, NASA said <a target="_blank" href="https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-024?news=true">in a statement</a> about the findings Thursday.</p><p>Scientists previously thought they knew what could cause such a bright burst of energy. But the latest observation, first spotted in April this year, is causing them to rethink what may be happening.</p><p>"The more we learn about LFBOTs, the more they surprise us," Ashley Chrimes, an author on a paper about the discoveries and European Space Agency Research Fellow, said in the press release.</p><h2>A bright flash where it shouldn't be</h2><p>Because these flashes are so brilliant and short-lived — <a target="_blank" href="http://static7.businessinsider.com/hubble-telescope-almost-ended-in-disaster-2015-4?jwsource=cl">LFBOTs</a> turn off in a matter of days — scientists had previously concluded they must be caused by a specific type of event called a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nearby-supernova-galaxy-brightest-how-to-watch-2023-6">core-collapse supernova</a>.</p><p>Supernovae usually <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nearby-supernova-galaxy-brightest-how-to-watch-2023-6">shine for months</a>. By contrast, core-collapse supernovae, which occur at the death of the biggest of stars, release a burst of energy that only lasts a few days, which is in line with what was being seen during an LFBOT, per the press release.</p><p>The problem is that this latest LFBOT, nicknamed the "Finch," happened 15,000 light years from the nearest galaxy. That's much too far for a core-collapse supernova to travel.</p><p>Supernovae come from stars, which are born inside galaxies. Because big stars don't live long, it's very unlikely a star that big would have had the time to travel that far before bursting into a core-collapse supernova, per the press release.</p><p>"We've now shown that LFBOTs can occur a long way from the center of the nearest galaxy, and the location of the Finch is not what we expect for any kind of supernova," said Chrimes in the press release.</p><h2>An unidentified black hole or two traveling stars crashing?</h2><p>So it's back to the drawing board to try to understand what is causing the LFBOTs.</p><p>There are a few more hypotheses for what could cause the bright blue flashes. But they are a bit weirder.</p><p>One possibility is a black hole is swallowing up stars. In that case, you'd expect to see a globular cluster of stars around it, which hasn't been spotted yet. But it may be the case that the telescopes pointed at the area so far aren't powerful enough. The new <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/james-webb-telescope-game-changing-discoveries-first-year-2023-7">James Webb Space Telescope</a>, with its extended capabilities, could provide more answers, per the press release.</p><p>Another possibility is that two rogue neutron stars have been <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/astronomers-discover-fastest-runaway-stars-in-milky-way-galaxy-2023-6">traveling through space </a>at breakneck speeds, and they happened to crash into each other creating a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jwst-spotted-stars-colliding-impact-could-have-created-gold-space-2023-7">kilonova</a>, an explosion 1,000 times more powerful than a standard nova.</p><div type="image" title="An artist's impressino of a kilonova" height="338" width="600" msid="104317508" hostid="261" sizebytes="6196"></div><p>"The discovery poses many more questions than it answers," said Chrimes in the press release. "More work is needed to figure out which of the many possible explanations is the right one."</p><p>The findings were shared ahead of publication on a pre-print server and are expected to be published in the peer-reviewed journal The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society shortly.</p>

NASA's Hubble spots a mysterious flash in the middle of nowhere that defies science

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Large collisions in space, like those between <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/black-holes">black holes</a> or neutron stars, create ripples in space-time called <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/gravitational-waves" target="_blank" rel="noopener">gravitational waves</a>. The phenomenon was first predicted by <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/albert-einstein/">Albert Einstein</a>.</li><li><strong>The <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/ligo">Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory</a></strong> (LIGO) recently sensed gravitational waves from a collision of two neutron stars - the second such event ever detected.</li><li>But these <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/neutron-stars">neutron stars</a> were more massive than scientists thought possible, and nobody picked up light or radiation from the aftermath of their collision.</li><li>That could indicate a new a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/waves-from-black-hole-swallowing-neutron-star-2019-8">new type of collision</a> in deep space, in which neutron stars meet and immediately collapse into a black hole.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.</a></li></ul><p>Scientists may have stumbled upon a previously unknown class of massive collision in the universe. </p><p>On Monday, researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) <a href="https://www.ligo.org/detections/GW190425.php">announced</a> that they had yet again detected ripples in space-time. They think these particular disturbances in the fabric of the universe - which were observed in April 2019 - came from the collision of two neutron stars, the super-dense remnants of dead stars.</p><p>That would make this the second neutron-star collision ever detected, but it was quite different from the earlier one.</p><p>After the first collision was detected in 2017, telescopes turned to its location in the sky. Scientists studied the collision's aftermath in visible light, radio waves, X-rays, and gamma rays. But this time, they didn't find any signs of the collision other than its ripples in space-time.</p><p>That has led astrophysicists to wonder whether they've discovered an entirely new class of cataclysmic event in deep space - one in which neutron stars meet and immediately collapse into a black hole, leaving no trace behind.</p><h2>Einstein's predictions led scientists to violent new events in space</h2><p>Ripples in space-time are called gravitational waves. They usually come from distant collisions between massive objects, like black holes and neutron stars. Albert Einstein first predicted the phenomenon, but he didn't think gravitational waves would ever be detected. They seemed too weak to pick up on Earth amid all the noise and vibrations.</p><p>For 100 years, it seemed Einstein was right.</p><p>But in the late 1990s, LIGO's machines in Washington and Louisiana were built in an attempt to pick up the signals Einstein thought we'd never detect.</p><p>Finally, in September 2015, after 13 years of silence, LIGO detected its <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gravitational-waves-detected-first-time-ligo-2016-2">first gravitational waves</a>: signals from the merger of two black holes some 1.3 billion light-years away. The discovery opened a new field of astronomy and earned a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/2017-nobel-prize-in-physics-gravitational-waves-kip-thorne-rainer-weiss-barry-barish-2017-10">Nobel prize in physics</a> for three researchers who helped conceive of LIGO.</p><p>Since then, LIGO and its Italian companion Virgo have identified two other types of collisions. The observatories registered gravitational waves from <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/neutron-stars-crash-ligo-gravitational-waves-periodic-elements-2017-10">two neutron stars merging</a> for the first time in October 2017. In August 2019, LIGO and Virgo detected what scientists believe was <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/waves-from-black-hole-swallowing-neutron-star-2019-8">a black hole swallowing a neutron star</a>.</p><p>The waves LIGO picked up in April most likely came from another collision of two neutron stars, about 520 million light-years away. That's about four times more distant than the 2017 event.</p><p>Virgo did not detect the latest gravitational waves (probably because of the distance); only the more sensitive LIGO detector in Louisiana picked them up. Its companion machine in Washington was temporarily offline for maintenance.</p><p>As a result, scientists didn't get much data beyond the neutron stars' distance and mass. They calculated that the neutron stars were 3.4 times the mass of the sun - far more massive than scientists thought possible. </p><p>Something else was weird, too: Scientists didn't see any gamma rays, the radiation signals that are supposed to arrive just seconds after gravitational waves from a neutron-star merger. </p><h2>A new class of massive space collision?</h2><p>Scientists expect neutron stars to collide in high-energy explosions, causing heavy elements to form and emitting bright light and gamma-ray radiation. This explosion is known as "kilonova" because it's about 1,000 times brighter than a nova (the bright flash emitted by newborn stars). </p><p>But the gamma rays were mysteriously missing following the collision, and no telescopes spotted a bright light, either. </p><p>"We're in that uncertain position of not knowing if we didn't observe a kilonova because there really wasn't one, or if we simply didn't observe it because it was too far away," Martin Hendry, a LIGO scientist and astrophysicist at the University of Glasgow, told Business Insider.</p><p>Scientists think a possible explanation could be that the colliding neutron stars were so massive that they collapsed immediately into a black hole, as astrophysicist Ethan Siegel proposed in a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/08/did-ligo-just-discover-two-fundamentally-different-types-of-neutron-star-mergers/#6e6950de2861">Forbes</a> article. </p><p>"Perhaps, above a certain mass threshold, higher-mass neutron-star mergers simply interact and go directly to a black hole, swallowing up all of the matter associated with both stars, producing no heavy elements and emitting no further observable signal at all," Siegel wrote.</p><p>If true, that could mean collisions between low-mass neutron stars - which produce kilonovae - have dramatically different results than collisions between massive neutron stars, which might not explode at all. </p><p>In that case, the newly observed neutron-star merger would represent an entirely new class of catastrophic collision.</p><p>"For a long, long time we had a sample size of zero, and now we've got a sample size of two," Hendry said. "So there's the tantalizing question as to whether they really are two distinct classes or whether it's just that, as we observe more and more, we'll kind of fill in a continuum." </p><h2>Hundreds of Earths' worth of gold and platinum</h2><p>When the 2017 neutron-star collision was confirmed, the discovery solved a long-standing mystery about the origins of most of the universe's heavy elements. </p><p>Scientists discovered that the explosion had forged roughly 50 Earth masses' worth of silver, 100 Earth masses of gold, and 500 Earth masses of platinum. The gold alone <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-gold-created-in-neutron-star-collision-2017-10">was worth about $100 octillion</a> at 2017 market price, or $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 written out.</p><p>A bit of nuclear alchemy called the rapid process, or r-process, is responsible for creating these metals.</p><p>It goes like this: As neutron stars move toward each other, a tiny bit of their material gets shot into space at incredible speeds. Those neutrons are very hot and crowded, so they smash together while moving outward, forming giant atomic cores. Very big atoms are highly unstable, so they almost immediately break apart and decay into smaller atoms - stuff like platinum, gold, silver, and even iodine.</p><p>However, if the neutron stars in the most recent collision collapsed directly into a black hole as some astronomers suspect, there would have been no r-process, and the crash would not have forged gold or platinum, Hendry said.</p><h2>Astronomers could detect new collisions every day by the mid-2020s</h2><p>To detect more gravitational-wave events with more precision, researchers are fitting the LIGO and Virgo detectors with a series of technical upgrades. In December 2019, they <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ligo-gravitational-wave-detector-more-powerful-squeezing-light-2019-12">installed a device that squeezes light</a>, allowing LIGO to make 50% more detections.</p><p>"We're really looking, by the middle of this decade, at having an event every day or so," Hendry said. </p><p>Most of the gravitational waves observed so far have come from collisions between two black holes. But the ability to make more detections could mean that scientists wind up finding dozens of neutron-star mergers each year.</p><p>An <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/earth-gravitational-wave-detector-ligo-virgo-upgrade-einstein-2019-10">upcoming Japanese observatory</a>, the Kamioka Gravitational-wave Detector (KAGRA), will also help scientists narrow down the source of gravitational waves to smaller points in the sky.</p><p>KAGRA was built underground and will use cryogenically cooled mirrors to help protect sensitive instruments from picking up false signals. The detector is slated to come online by April 30, but scientists will then need to fine-tune its instruments before it can fully join the gravitational-wave hunt later this year.</p><p>Another observatory, LIGO India, is expected to join the global network in 2025.</p><p>Together, these new and upgraded detection tools could help scientists determine whether there are indeed various classes of catastrophic neutron-star collisions in space.</p><p>"What we need to do is observe a whole bunch of neutron-star events," Hendry said. "It's too soon to say with only our second neutron-star merger, but once we have a few dozen or so, we can start really looking at the statistics."</p>

Scientists detected ripples in space and time from a potentially new class of collision in the universe. Their observatory cracked a 100-year-old mystery posed by Einstein.

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://obs.carnegiescience.edu/swope">UC Santa Cruz/Carnegie Observatories</a></span></p><p class="caption">The Swope Telescope was one of several that recorded a neutron star merger's kilonova.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>2017 was a year of discovery: NASA started using reusable rockets, patients started treating cancer using only their own cells, and scientists discovered the Earth's lost eighth continent.</p><p>Here are some of the wildest, coolest, most promising <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">science</keyword> finds of the year: </p>

The wildest scientific discoveries of 2017

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>NASA</span></p><p class="caption">An illustration of two neutron stars colliding.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><ul><li><strong>For the first time ever, astronomers have detected a neutron star collision.</strong></li><li><strong>Gravitational waves picked up by the LIGO and Virgo detectors pinpointed the source to a galaxy 130 million light-years away.</strong></li><li><strong>The collision produced a radioactive "kilonova" that forged hundreds of Earths' worth of platinum, gold, silver, and other heavy elements.</strong></li></ul><p>Platinum and gold are among the most precious substances on Earth, each fetching roughly $1,000 per ounce.</p><p>However, their allure may grow stronger - and weirder - thanks to a groundbreaking new finding about their violent, radioactive, cosmic origins.</p><p>On Monday, scientists <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/2017-nobel-prize-in-physics-gravitational-waves-kip-thorne-rainer-weiss-barry-barish-2017-10">who won a Nobel Prize</a> for their discovery of gravitational waves, or <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/gravitational-waves-detected-first-time-ligo-2016-2">ripples in the fabric of space</a>, announced the first-ever detection of the collision of two neutron stars.</p><p>The team alerted astronomers all over the world to the event, helping them point telescopes directly at the crash scene, and recorded unprecedented observations of the aftermath in visible light, radio waves, X-rays, and gamma rays.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://obs.carnegiescience.edu/swope">UC Santa Cruz/Carnegie Observatories</a></span></p><p class="caption">The Swope Telescope was one of several that recorded a neutron star merger's kilonova.</p></div><p></p></div></div>These images revealed a radioactive soup giving birth to unfathomable amounts of platinum, gold, and silver - not to mention the iodine in our bodies, uranium in <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-weapons-stockpiles-world-map-2017-8">nuclear weapons</a>, and bismuth in Pepto-Bismol - while blasting those materials deep into space.</p><p>The two neutron stars likely merged to form a black hole, though the tiny bit of neutron star that escaped could get recycled into planets like Earth, where creatures may eventually dig up the metals.</p><p>"The calculations we did suggest most of the matter that came out of this event was in a swirling disk around a black hole. Half of that matter fell in, and half of it got ejected," Brian Metzger, an astrophysicist at Columbia University one of roughly 4,000 researchers involved in the discovery, told Business Insider. "The matter that ended up in your wedding band could have just as well fallen in."</p><p>Astronomers detected the merger from 130 million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 4993 on morning of August 17.</p><p>"This is going to have a bigger impact on <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">science</keyword> and human understanding, in many ways, than the first discovery of gravitational waves," Duncan Brown, an astronomer at Syracuse University and a member of the research collaboration, told Business Insider. "We're going to be puzzling over the observations we've made with gravitational waves and with light for years to come."</p><h2>When two city-size atoms collide</h2><p>Albert Einstein first predicted the existence of gravitational waves a century ago, but he didn't believe they'd ever be detected due to their extraordinarily weak energies.</p><p>The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (<a href="https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/">LIGO</a>) in the US defied Einstein in November 2015, when it "heard" the elusive phenomenon for the first time and proved its existence. Europe's new Virgo gravitational wave detector has also come online since then and worked with LIGO to make this fifth detection possible.</p><p>Yet unlike the four previous events, the latest one wasn't created by colliding black holes. Its signal was weaker, closer to Earth by hundreds of millions of light-years, and lasted 100 seconds as opposed to 1 second.</p><p>Brown and others think the new gravitational wave signal, dubbed "GW170817", is revolutionary because it provides clues about how the heaviest elements found on Earth formed in space. Iron and lighter elements, for example, are thought to form in giant stars that explode as supernovas - blasts that are brighter than billions of suns.</p><p>"Some of the heavy elements are made in supernova explosions, but it turns out this can't explain the abundances," Brown said. "They didn't appear to be coming from supernova explosions, and so people have wondered for a long time where they came from."</p><p>Researchers eventually hypothesized that pairs of colliding neutron stars could do the trick.</p><p>Most stars in the universe form in pairs, and the same is true of massive stars. Unlike the sun, however, big stars become supernovas when they die. And at that point, their own gravity crushes them into one of two forms: a black hole (if they're heavier than about three suns) or a neutron star (if they're between about 1.5 and three suns' worth of mass).</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>LIGO-Virgo/Daniel Schwen/Northwestern</span></p><p class="caption">The size of a neutron star (top) compared to the Chicago skyline.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>The latter is essentially one big atomic nucleus, since its gravity is powerful enough to squash all the particles together into an orb roughly the width of a metropolitan city - just one teaspoon weighs billions of tons.</p><p>"You smash these two things together at one-third the speed of light, and that's how you make gold," Brown said. "Turns out it's not the Philosopher's Stone, it's not the things alchemists were looking at thousands of years ago."</p><h2>100 Earths of gold forged in 1 second</h2><p>Metzger was among the first to seriously explore how this could happen.</p><p>He said a neutron star merger is a "messy process" that spills some of the stars' guts into space, like "squeezing a tube of toothpaste" - and accelerates those particles to a fraction of the speed of light while heating them to 10 million degrees.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Fermilab</span></p><p class="caption">An illustration of a neutron star collision creating platinum, gold, and other precious heavy elements.</p></div><p></p></div></div>"If you just ejected all of this stuff and it did nothing, it'd get extremely cold and we'd never be able to see it," Metzger said, though that's not what happened on August 17, of course.</p><p>"The heaviest elements, you can't create them through nuclear fusion in a star. The way you form them is through neutron-capture," Metzger said.</p><p>The process, known appropriately as the rapid process (or r-process), goes like this: As the two neutron stars spiral toward each other - each about 1.4 times the mass of the sun - they shed high-energy neutrons. Those neutrons smash into each other while moving outward, building giant atomic cores. But huge super-atoms are unstable, so they almost immediately break apart and decay into smaller atoms.</p><p>The same thing happens in nuclear reactors, which bombard uranium with neutrons to form the heavier element plutonium. A neutron star merger performs the r-process on a cosmic scale, bleeding off enough radioactive energy from decaying super-atoms to be visible from millions of light-years away.</p><p>In 2010, Metzger coined this flash of radioactive light a "kilonova" because calculations showed it'd be dimmer than a supernova yet about 1,000 times brighter than a nova (a flash that occurs when a star is born).</p><p>Scientists have seen what they suspected were kilonovas before, but couldn't confirm the masses of the two objects as happened with GW170817.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>1M2H Collaboration/UC Santa Cruz/Carnegie Observatories</span></p><p class="caption">The first neutron star collision ever detected changed color from blue to red four days after it was found.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Their observations of the recent kilonova revealed a striking tally of materials created: 50 Earth masses' worth of silver, 100 Earth masses of gold, and 500 Earth masses of platinum.</p><p>The gold alone is worth about 100 octillion dollars at today's market price, according to Metzger, or $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 written out (1 followed by 29 zeroes).</p><p>"You'd need Captain Kirk to go and get it for you, though, so we're not in any danger of disrupting the market right now," Brown said.</p><h2>A new era of astronomy is beginning</h2><p>In the worldwide call to arms on August 17, and in the days and months that followed, more than a third of all astronomers on the planet stepped up to help analyze and make sense of the event.</p><p>Vicky Kalogera, a member of the LIGO collaboration and an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, said she was one of nine people who wrote the main research study about the discovery. The writing process took the team two weeks of 12- to 16-hour international conference calls with hundreds of people from 910 institutions. The printed list of 4,000-or-so authors runs 28 pages long.</p><p>"It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life," Kalogera told Business Insider, and added that more discoveries are on the way.</p><p>"These are rare events. For a galaxy like the one we're observing, it's somewhere between 30 and 470 neutron star mergers per million years," Kalogera said. "But LIGO is not sensitive only to this particular galaxy. We should see a few per year, because we're listening to millions of galaxies."</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>LIGO</span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Brown said LIGO entered a planned year-long upgrade shortly after the experiment detected GW170817. (LIGO was last <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/ligo-detecting-gravitational-waves-more-sensitive-2016-11">booted up in November 2016</a> and ran through August 2017.)</p><p>After the new work is finished in 2018, he said, LIGO should have a 50% boost in range - allowing it to gaze another 500 million light-years deeper into space and time. And in the early 2020s, a Japanese detector called KAGRA and perhaps an Indian detector will join forces to listen to even more of the universe.</p><p>Researchers hope these improvements will reveal the secrets of a nearby supernova - perhaps Betelgeuse, which could explode at any moment.</p><p>"In some sense, this is the next big undiscovered country for gravitational waves," Brown said. "But we're only at the beginning of gravitational-wave astronomy, and we've been rewarded with these incredible discoveries."</p> <p class="tagline">Get the latest Gold price<a href="http://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/gold-price"> here.</a></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/2017-nobel-prize-in-physics-gravitational-waves-kip-thorne-rainer-weiss-barry-barish-2017-10">Scientists won the Nobel Prize for detecting gravitational waves - here's why that matters</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

Astronomers just proved the incredible origin of nearly all gold, platinum, and silver in the universe

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>More than 4,000 astronomers on Monday revealed the first-ever detection of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/neutron-stars-crash-ligo-gravitational-waves-periodic-elements-2017-10">two neutron stars colliding in space</a>.</p><p>Such objects are the skeletons of massive stars that have cataclysmically exploded, leaving behind a core so dense that just a teaspoon's worth can weigh billions of tons.</p><p>When the two neutron stars spiraled into each other, they created ripples in the fabric of space called <a href="http://www.techinsider.io/gravitational-waves-detected-first-time-ligo-2016-2">gravitational waves</a>. Special instruments on Earth later "heard" those murmurs from 130 million light-years away - allowing an army of astronomers to zero in on the crash and study it in unprecedented detail on August 17.</p><p>Among other findings, the data&#xa0;settle&#xa0;a longstanding mystery about the universe: Where most of its gold, platinum, and other heavy elements come from.</p><p>"You smash these two things together at one-third the speed of light, and that's how you make gold," <a href="http://asfaculty.syr.edu/pages/phy/brown-duncan.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Duncan Brown</a>, an astronomer at Syracuse University and a member of the research collaboration, told Business Insider. "Turns out it's not the Philosopher's Stone, it's not the things alchemists were looking at thousands of years ago."</p><p>Observations revealed the event forged roughly 50 Earth masses' worth of silver, 100 Earth masses of gold, and 500 Earth masses of platinum.</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p><a href="http://www.columbia.edu/~bdm2129/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Brian Metzger</a>, an astrophysicist at Columbia University and another LIGO collaborator, said a bit of nuclear alchemy called the rapid process or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-process" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">r-process</a>&#xa0;is what drives the creation of such heavy elements.</p><p>The r-process goes something like this: As neutron stars move toward each other, a tiny bit of their material gets shot into space at incredible speeds. Those neutrons are very hot and crowded, so they smash together while moving outward, forming giant atomic cores. Very big atoms are highly unstable, though, so they almost immediately break apart and decay into smaller atoms - stuff like platinum, gold, silver, and even iodine (which is used by our bodies to regulate metabolism).</p><p>Radiation emitted by these newly forming elements makes the event visible from Earth as a "kilonova," a term coined by Metzger because it's about 1,000 times brighter than a nova (the bright flash emitted by newborn stars).</p><p>A similar process is used in <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/thorium-molten-salt-reactors-sorensen-lftr-2017-2">special nuclear reactors</a> to build new atoms, such as plutonium for <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-weapons-stockpiles-world-map-2017-8">nuclear weapons</a>. But merging neutron stars excel at&#xa0;it on a cosmic scale.</p><p>The gold forged alone is worth about 100 octillion dollars at <a href="http://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/gold-price">today's market price</a>, according to Metzger, or $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 written out (1 followed by 29 zeroes).</p><p>"You'd need Captain Kirk to go and get it for you, though, so we're not in any danger of disrupting the market right now," Brown said.</p><p><br>However, the universe's unfathomable time scales baked a fantastic amount of these exotic metals right into the Earth, where we can dig them up.</br></p><p>"The rate of these neutron star mergers in our galaxy is about one every 100,000 years. On human time scales, that's a long time," Brown said. "But on galactic time scales, when you're creating stars and solar systems, that's not that much time."</p><p class="tagline">Get the latest Gold price<a href="http://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/gold-price"> here.</a></p><div><div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:61%"></div></div>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/ligo-gravitational-waves-neutron-star-merger-explained-2017-10">A new discovery with gravitational waves has helped scientists fill in a gaping hole in the periodic table</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

Astronomers detected 100 Earths' worth of gold being forged in space - here's how much it's worth

<p><strong><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Fermilab</span></p><p class="caption">An illustration of a neutron star collision creating platinum, gold, and other precious heavy elements.</p></div><p></p></div></div></strong></p><ul><li><strong>Neutron stars that crash together in space forge valuable metals like silver, gold, and platinum.</strong></li><li><strong>Some heavy periodic elements may be created almost exclusively by such cosmic crashes.</strong></li><li><strong>Europium, one of the least-common elements in the universe, is a candidate and is used in TVs, lasers, and plastics.</strong></li><li><strong>A neutron-star collision discovered through gravitational waves made about 1-5 Earths' worth of the europium, according to a new study.</strong></li></ul><p><br />In October 2017, astrophysicists announced a <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-gold-created-in-neutron-star-collision-2017-10">remarkable discovery</a>: The first-ever detection of two dead stars smashing together.</p><p>The collision created <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/gravitational-waves-detected-first-time-ligo-2016-2">gravitational waves</a>, or ripples in spacetime, which were "heard" by the LIGO experiment. But the event - unlike <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/third-gravitational-waves-event-heard-2017-6">merging black holes</a> - threw off gobs of neutrons (essentially super-heavy-element barf).</p><p>This material almost immediately decayed into lighter elements, leading to a bright, radioactive "kilonova" astronomers could see some 85 million to 160 million light-years away from Earth. Light from the energetic breakdown of this material suggest that it led to the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/neutron-stars-crash-ligo-gravitational-waves-periodic-elements-2017-10">unimaginably valuable</a> formation of about 50 Earth masses' worth of silver, 100 Earth masses of gold, and 500 Earth masses of platinum.</p><p>Researchers who've pored over the data since last year now think the collision also made 1-5 Earth masses of a very rare element called europium, according to <a href="https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/aaad67" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a recent study</a> in The Astrophysical Journal. (They also dialed back the gold-formation estimate to 3-13 Earth masses worth.)</p><p>The study could mean that neutron-star collisions are responsible for forging most of the europium and gold we find on Earth, not to mention other key elements.</p><h2>What europium is and how it's made</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eu-Block.jpg">Alchemist-hp/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)</a></span></p><p class="caption">A 99.998% pure sample of the metallic element europium.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Europium is element number 63 on the Periodic Table, and it's a somewhat hard, silvery metal that reacts with oxygen and water - so it's never found in pure form. When it is pure, it's stored in inert gases (e.g. argon) to prevent it from oxidizing and tarnishing.</p><p>The element is used to make some red lasers, electronic parts, and the <a href="https://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele063.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">red phosphors</a> of cathode-ray-style television sets. (One estimate suggests there's <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120623013009/http://vector.umd.edu/links_files/Extractive%20Metallurgy%20of%20Rare%20Earths%20%28Gupta%29.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">0.5-1 gram</a> of europium in every CRT screen.) Its ability to react to ultraviolet light also makes it an anti-counterfeit measure <a href="http://www.aquimicadascoisas.org/en/?episodio=the-chemistry-of-euro-notes" target="_blank" rel="noopener">in euro paper currency</a>.</p><p>Europium is also seeing newfound use in <a href="https://compoundsemiconductor.net/article/97559-europium-propels-the-gan-led-into-the-red.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ultra-bright-red LEDs</a> and - if the technology pans out - could lead to a <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/517153a" target="_blank" rel="noopener">stable quantum hard drive</a>.</p><p>Researchers suspected europium was formed by colliding neutron stars, but couldn't be sure how much until one was detected. Another explanation is that cataclysmic explosions of stars, called supernovas, form most europium and other elements heavier than nitrogen.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nucleosynthesis_periodic_table.svg">Cmglee/Wikipedia (CC BY SA 3.0)</a></span></p><p class="caption">Purple on this periodic table of elements shows the types of heavy atoms forged by neutron star mergers.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>A bit of nuclear alchemy called the rapid process or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-process" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">r-process</a> is what drives the creation of such heavy elements.</p><p>The r-process goes something like this: As neutron stars move toward each other, a tiny bit of their material gets shot into space at incredible speeds. Those neutrons are very hot and crowded, so they smash together while moving outward, forming giant atomic cores.</p><p>Because very big atoms are highly unstable, they almost immediately break apart and decay into smaller atoms - stuff like platinum, gold, silver, and europium.</p><p>Fortunately, we don't need a spaceship to find this stuff created by neutron stars - it's here on Earth. Countless smash-ups over the millennia spread around enough of these exotic metals that when our planet formed, they were baked right into its crust.</p><p>"The rate of these neutron star mergers in our galaxy is about one every 100,000 years. On human time scales, that's a long time," Duncan Brown, an astronomer at Syracuse University who's a member of the LIGO research collaboration, previously told Business Insider. "But on galactic time scales, when you're creating stars and solar systems, that's not that much time."</p><p>What's still uncertain is how much colliding neutron stars might contribute to europium. If LIGO finds more and more colliding neutron stars over the years, it's likely those events - not supernovas - are where the most valuable materials on the planet come from.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/2017-nobel-prize-in-physics-gravitational-waves-kip-thorne-rainer-weiss-barry-barish-2017-10">Scientists won the Nobel Prize for detecting gravitational waves - here's why that matters</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

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