China-US astronomy team may have found possible relic of a recent ‘gold factory’

A mysterious glow of high-energy light in our Milky Way galaxy could be the remains of an extremely rare cosmic “gold factory”, according to a new study by Chinese and US researchers.

The collision of two orbiting neutron stars – dead stars so dense that a teaspoon of their matter would weigh a billion tonnes – may have shone as brightly as Jupiter in the sky, they wrote in a paper posted last week on the preprint server arXiv, which has yet to be peer-reviewed.

The violent smash spewed out atoms and a flood of neutrons, which the atoms soaked up to form some of the universe’s heaviest elements, such as gold, platinum and uranium, while the wreckage collapsed into a black hole.

The blast probably happened less than 1,000 years ago, as the glowing cloud it left behind is still small and bright, signs of a young remnant, wrote the researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.