You know what they say that you need to travel a long road in life to become rich. If you want to get your hands on an abundance of heavy elements such as gold or platinum, meaning that you won’t need to work again for the rest of your life, we know where you should go!
According to Phys.org, the remote locations in the Universe where neutron stars collide represent the places where many of those heavy elements abide. The only problem is that you need to find a way to travel huge distances across the Cosmos and find another way to survive near neutron star collisions. It seems impossible, but hey, who would have thought 100 years ago that people would have computers in their pockets, for instance?
More heavy metals were produced in binary neutron star collisions than in other cosmic events
Thanks to the new study done by researchers at MIT and also the University of New Hampshire, we know that for the last 2.5 billion years, things were pretty disproportionate. The conclusion is that more heavy metals were created in binary neutron star collisions than in the case of mergers between a black hole and a neutron star.
Hsin-Yu Chen, who is the lead author of the new study, declared as quoted by Phys.org:
What we find exciting about our result is that to some level of confidence we can say binary neutron stars are probably more of a goldmine than neutron star-black hole mergers.
If you’re looking for a definition of neutron stars, Wikipedia is going straight to the point:
A neutron star is the collapsed core of a massive supergiant star, which had a total mass of between 10 and 25 solar masses, possibly more if the star was especially metal-rich.
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