neutron stars merging, producing gold platinum science

New frontier for science as astronomers witness neutron stars colliding:

Extraordinary event has been ‘seen’ for the first time, in both gravitational waves and light – ending decades-old debate about where gold comes from
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/16/astronomers-witness-neutron-stars-collide-global-rapid-response-event-ligo

"Neutron stars are the smallest, densest stars known to exist: about 12 miles wide, with a teaspoon of neutron star material having a mass of about a billion tons.

 The core is a soup of pure neutrons, while the crust is smooth, solid and 10 billion times stronger than steel.

The 100-second hum picked up by Ligo told the story of how the two stars, each slightly heavier than the sun, approached their death. Initially separated by 200 miles, they circled each other 30 times a second.

As they whirled inwards, accelerating to 2,000 orbits each second, the signal rose in pitch like a slide whistle.

Two seconds later, Nasa’s Fermi space telescope picked up an intense burst of gamma rays, emitted as shockwaves rushed through jets of matter funnelled out of the poles during the monumental impact of the collision.
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“We dropped everything and pointed at that bit of sky,” he said. “This was the most unusual object we’d ever seen.”

Smartt’s team, and those on other telescopes, observed the faint new blob and measured its spectrum to assess the chemical composition. The blob was a fireball of radioactive heavy chemical elements, known as a kilonova, that had been blown out from the collision at one fifth of the speed of light shortly after the gamma ray burst.

(The wedding band on your finger or the gold watch you’re wearing was most likely produced by two neutron stars colliding)

Previously, scientists had speculated that the sheer force of neutron star collisions would be enough to force extra neutrons into the nuclei of atoms, forging heavy elements like gold and platinum, but until now this idea was purely theoretical.

“People have been looking for that forever,” said Freise.

“This is the first real confirmation that heavy elements such as gold, platinum and uranium are either solely or predominantly produced in binary neutron star collisions,” said Reitze.