Thar's gold in them thar neutron stars!
RogerB
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"Apparently, with the discovery of the counterpart of GW170817, scientists also literally struck gold. Edo Berger (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) once calculated that a run-of-the-mill neutron star merger may produce no less than 10 times the mass of the Moon in pure gold. Gijs Nelemans (Radboud University, The Netherlands) thinks it may well be much higher, up to a few Earth masses."
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There goes the gold price.
Here's a warning parable for coin collectors...
Don't fret, will take about 100 million years for any gold to get to our solar system....
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Read that and was amazed....you putting together a mining expedition?
bob
Seems odd that the merging of neutron stars would produce an actual element. Neutron stars are so dense that they've compressed all matter into neutron degeneracy material. A literal soup of neutronium with a small amount of protons and electrons mixed into the broth. There is no room for electron clouds to form because the immense gravity has crushed all matter together so closely. How could gold (or any other element) survive?
Guess I gotta read some now.
Agree LanLord, the properties of matter and energy change significantly in such cases. Time and space get really warped too. "Gold" , at site of the merger of a couple if neutron stars, isn't a useful concept. Neither are "today", "here", or for that matter, "us". Fascinating stuff to consider, from our nice cozy planet.
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Actually a fascinating article.
It basically says that most gold wasn't created how we thought. Most of it comes from colliding neutron stars, not supernovas.
And all of the gold on Earth was created far from our solar system before our solar system existed. All of it is more than 4.5 billion years old. I think that's pretty amazing.
Who wants to wait around and get clobbered by gold nuggets travelling at 20-30% the speed of light?
What a way to go!
Wait until some promoter starts selling rights to the gold complete with a trip to pick it up. Something like "Passengers" just a much longer trip.
So, we're all thinking about ways to develop tech to mine a distant neutron star collision... that time's probably better spent inventing time travel tech to return to Sutter's Mill, CA a few years before 1849.
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Pete
We should just travel to Jupiter and / or Saturn and collect the diamond rain.
Not precious metals, but still could be some big bucks as long as there are no conflicts with the Jupiterians or the Saturians that we force to mine the atmosphers there!
Any physicists in the crowd? I'm confused on the point where they say a teaspoon of this jumble of colliding stars weighs like a hundred million tons. But the periodic table doesn't go that high
I'm taking that to mean that there are gazillions of atomic particles packed into a very small space, and that the whole thing is rather unstable.......
Most of an atom consists of empty space. Neutrons are subatomic particles packed together by the gravity of the star.
Just wait until they announce that they also contain just as much bitcoin.
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I'm intentionally glossing over some points here but the periodic table represents (roughly) the relative masses of individual examples of particular elements. This doesn't speak to density. You can have oxygen in gas form, solid form, liquid... all of which have different densities.
Neutron stars effectively become a new state of matter (Not just one massive "element #1 billion") held up from further collapse due to quantum mechanical properties (happy to get into this further if anyone wants a treatise on antisymmetric wavefunctions :-) ).
It's estimated there are over 20 million tons of gold dissolved in the oceans. It's a lot closer, but just as unattainable...
Meh. I'd rather have the rain diamonds of Jupiter & Saturn...
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24477667
There is more gold in the sea than has ever been mined, just wait for that technology to develop.....
This is spot on.
If you were to compare an atom to a football stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a flea at the 50 yard line while the electron cloud would be out around the cement superstructure of the stadium. All the rest of that space is made up of nothing.
In a neutronium environment, all matter is squeezed to the point that mainly neutrons exist literally shoulder to shoulder. There are a few random protons and electrons, but few and far between. There are no discreet atomic particles, no electron clouds, only neutron degeneracy keeping the matter from collapsing further into a singularity. The entire neutron star appears like one mass of neutrons in a nucleus.
Well.... the report is that the 'merger' produced $80 Octillion worth of gold....that would sure dump the market in the tank....I had never heard of an octillion before....
Cheers, RickO
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The mathematical concepts googol and googolplex were postulated long before the quasi-infinite numismatic term "gazillionaire" was invented.
You can look these terms up on Google, which I've never heard was not a pun.
Sergey? Larry? 
Looks like gold fellas! Must be a neutron star nearby.
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