Washington
Post: Until recently it was thought that heavy elements,
such as gold, platinum, lead, and uranium, were only formed by
supernova explosions. But new evidence also points to
neutron-star collisions. On 3 June NASA’s
Swift space telescope detected a short gamma-ray burst
in a galaxy almost 4 billion light-years away. Subsequent
observations by the twin Chile-based Magellan telescopes and
the
Hubble Space Telescope revealed the radioactive
afterglow caused by the formation of a large number of heavy
atoms. The direct observation of such a large, brief explosion
led astronomers to believe it was caused by the merging of two
neutron stars, which would have the number of neutrons needed
to drive the formation of heavier elements. Those elements are
merely dust in the interstellar wind, however, until over
billions of years, gravitational forces pull the material
together to form planets and stars.
