Scientists explain gold can only be born in cataclysmic events

Jul 18, 2013 18:56 GMT  ·  By

They say leprechauns living at the end of the rainbow guard really big buckets filled with gold.

Still, people who are interested in getting their hands on loads of this precious metal would do best to go looking for two colliding dead stars instead.

Harvard-Smithsonian scientists say that, when two dead stars crashed into each other about a month ago, the collision led to the creation of substantial amounts of gold.

“We estimate that the amount of gold produced and ejected during the merger of the two neutron stars may be as large as 10 moon masses - quite a lot of bling!” researcher Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics explains.

Unlike elements such as carbon and iron, gold can only be born in the aftermath of cataclysmic events such as the collision of these neutron stars.

The phenomenon, known as a short gamma-ray burst to the scientific community, took place at about 3.9 billion light-years away from our planet, so it will probably be some time before we can turn all that gold into earrings and whatnot.