China-US astronomy team may have found possible relic of a recent ‘gold factory’
Por Ling Xin — South China Morning Post – News feed
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Mystery glow seen in the Milky Way could be the result of a violent collision between two orbiting neutron stars, according to scientists
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Ling Xin in Ohio Published: 2:00pm, 13 Oct 2026 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.
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