Colliding dead stars may produce gold
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.027610
BBC : A short gamma-ray burst that occurred in 2013—GRB 130603B—was likely the result of a neutron-star collision. Edo Berger of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues studied observations of the GRB’s afterglow captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. They say that excess near-IR emissions from the GRB indicate that it originated from a kilonova, an astronomical explosion whose brightness lies between that of normal starlight and a supernova. Much rarer than a supernova explosion, neutron-star collisions are cataclysmic events that release huge amounts of energy and may be responsible for generating the heavy elements of the periodic table, such as gold and platinum.
