Almost all the gold on Earth — every wedding ring, every coin, every gram in every bank vault — was forged in the collision of dead stars billions of years ago, in events so violent that a single one can produce hundreds of Earth-masses of gold, and the heavy elements were then scattered across the galaxy before our sun was even born

On 17 August 2017, two neutron stars in a galaxy called NGC 4993, about 130 million light-years from Earth, completed a spiral inward that had taken them millions of years and ended in a collision lasting fractions of a second. The gravitational waves from that collision reached Earth and were detected by the LIGO and [...] The post Almost all the gold on Earth — every wedding ring, every coin, every gram in every bank vault — was forged in the collision of dead stars billions of years ago, in e