If you wanted to get extremely rich and you don’t know how, you should be aware that there is likely more gold in the entire Universe than grains of sand in all beaches on Earth. You’ll just have to find a way to invent a superfast spacecraft or wait for others to do the job for you.
Gold is one of the heavy elements that can be created within supernovae furnaces, where temperatures are reaching unfathomable heights. But as the Universe is also unimaginably big, the total amount of gold is way off the charts. A recent study led by Chiaki Kobayashi, an astrophysicist at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom, tries to understand why there is so much gold in the Universe.
Regular supernovas can’t explain the vast amounts of gold
One of the new study’s conclusions is that regular supernovas can’t explain the Universe’s huge amounts of gold because stars that are massive enough to fuse gold before they die become black holes. Neutron star collisions and neither a magneto-rotational supernova don’t seem to explain why the Universe is loaded with gold.
Ian Roederer, an astrophysicist at the University of Michigan, says it clear:
This paper is not the first to suggest that neutron star collisions are insufficient to explain the abundance of gold,
During a magneto-rotational supernova that is very rare, a star spins so fast and is wracked by magnetic fields that it turns itself inside out. As it explodes, the star shoots jets of matter into space that are full of gold. But oddly enough, not even neutron stars and magneto-rotational supernovas combined can’t explain Earth’s abundance of gold.
Lead author Chiaki Kobayashi declared:
There’s two stages to this question,
Number one is: neutron star mergers are not enough. Number two: Even with the second source, we still can’t explain the observed amount of gold.
Hopefully, one day humanity will be able to bring gold from other planets and fully understand the origin of the precious element. Until that moment, somebody else out there should be extremely rich.
