The amount of gold made in the explosion weighs 200 times more than the Earth itself. Scientists in Coventry watched as gold on a cosmic scale was made during a universe-warping collision between two dead stars. The fireball, 130 million light years away, created huge quantities of the precious metal, along with vast amounts of platinum and uranium. Scientists said the amount of gold forged in the collision was 200 TIMES the weight of the Earth. The collision between the two neutron stars happened when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, but was so far away its effects have only just reached us.
The cataclysmic event was watched by a team of astronomers and scientists around the world, including Warwick University in Coventry. Neutron stars are the tiny burned-out remnants of giant stars, like our sun, and are so dense that a teaspoon of their rocks would weigh a billion tons. As a result, despite being just 12 miles across, their incredible weight meant they stretched and distorted space and time itself as they spiraled towards each other and collided.
Like a stone thrown in a pond, the ripples from the explosion fanned out across the universe. And even though the ripples traveled across space at the speed of light, the event was so far away that when the gravitational waves began their journey across space, dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The spectacular event was powerful enough to generate ripples in the very fabric of the universe, leading to the detection of gravitational waves on Earth and an answer to the origin of gamma rays.
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