Astronomers spot a gold mine in massive cosmic flares

sciencehabit writes: Before the silver or gold in your favorite piece of jewelry made its way to Earth, it first had to spawn during one of the universe’s most energetic explosions. At first, astronomers knew of only one cosmic scenario that fit the bill for this violent formation of “jewelry shop” elements: the collision of two ultra-dense stellar corpses called neutron stars. Now, a second has stepped onto the scene.

As they report this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers have discovered signatures of this heavy element formation — called the r-process — in a giant flare first detected from a highly magnetic neutron star in 2004.

The flare, which released more energy than our Sun does in a million years as it spewed electrically charged material, has remained shrouded in mystery since its discovery 20 years ago. Researchers quickly traced the outburst to a nearby magnetar, a special breed of neutron star whose magnetic fields are trillions times stronger than Earth’s. But ten minutes after the massive flare, a second, fainter signal inexplicably came from the same star.

More r-process sources may still be looming in the dark. The new study accounts for about 10% of the Milky Way’s heavy elements, suggesting that astronomers will have to scour the cosmos for even more places where the r-process is hiding. One potential spot is a rare type of supernova that births rapidly rotating neutron stars, says says Anirudh Patel, the new study’s lead author and an astronomer at Columbia University. He

hopes that with more observations, astronomers will be able to sharpen that picture. But for now, he says it’s exciting enough to find a new birthplace for what makes up so much of our world: “These heavy elements pervade our lives — we make use of them every day. It’s humbling to realize that these were made in such extreme astrophysical environments.”