Key facts
- A China-US astronomy team may have found a relic of a cosmic "gold factory".
- The relic could be the remains of colliding neutron stars.
- The event may have shone as brightly as Jupiter in the sky.
A mysterious glow of high-energy light in the 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, described as 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 heavy elements.
