- Cullman, Alabama  Community News Network  July 18, 2013
Origin of gold found in rare neutron-star collisions       The
neutron stars might provide the explanation.    Most of these
cosmic fruitcakes are solitary wanderers, but some are paired
up, as remnants of binary stars. They will orbit a common point
in space and gradually drift closer and closer, spiraling toward
one another in obedience to Einstein's laws of general
relativity. One day, they will collide.  In the Milky Way
galaxy, with hundreds of billions of stars, such a neutron-star
collision is likely to happen about once every 100,000 years,
Berger said.  Astronomers are fortunate in that the universe is
so vast, containing many billions of galaxies, that any all-sky
survey might possibly see something even as rare as a neutron-
star collision. So it was that on June 3, NASA's Swift space
telescope observed a flash of light, called a short gamma-ray
burst (GRB), in an extremely distant galaxy in the constellation
Leo.  Astronomers scrambled to r