中美天文学团队或发现近期“黄金工厂”遗迹
China-US astronomy team may have found possible relic of a recent ‘gold factory’
中美天文学团队认为，银河系中一团高能光辉可能是两颗中子星碰撞后留下的遗迹，这场碰撞或曾形成金、铂和铀等重元素。研究人员估计爆发发生在不到 1,000 年前；相关论文已发布于 arXiv，尚未经过同行评审。
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.
来源：南华早报 · scmp.com