It has been thought that valuable heavy elements like gold and platinum were created by massive cosmic collisions involving neutron stars or black holes, but a new finding suggests the gold on your ring finger or in your electronics might have really come from a rare supernova explosion that also gives birth to a black hole in the process.
The epic blast is called a "collapsar" and occurs when a very old and massive star collapses in on itself and implodes, leaving behind a brand-new black hole.
Physicist Daniel Siegel from the University of Guelph in Toronto worked with colleagues from Columbia University to model how collapsars eject heavy elements into the universe.
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"Eighty percent of these heavy elements we see should come from collapsars," Siegel said in a release. "Collapsars are fairly rare in occurrences of supernovae, even more rare than neutron star mergers — but the amount of material that they eject into space is much higher than that from neutron star mergers."
A paper explaining the result was published Thursday in the journal Read More – Source