In mexico, gold the the Mesoamerican culture was extremely valuable.
Particularly the Aztecs believed that gold was actually sweat of the Sun
and they can actually pick up the pieces of the sweat of the Sun
it had of course a strong spiritual value because the God of Sun was a very
important component of the culture
what's interesting is of course that the gold was not created in the Sun
it has this beautiful properties that you know it's shiny
is yellow and it's natural to assign it to an origin in the Sun but
today one of the biggest mysteries is you know where gold come from and
in fact not only gold but a large fraction of their very precious elements such as titanium
silver
we still haven't figured out where they come that
what type of explosive phenomenon can make these heavy elements which require
probably the most extreme conditions in the universe, the highest densities
and the highest temperatures to make these elements and in fact the stars that I'm
more interested in are those sort of
rock stars which basically are extremely luminous but they just have very short
lifetimes
and when they die they produce this very very heavy neutron star
or black holes. And in fact if I take a cup
of neutron star matter it weighs as much as mount everest
the story of the formation of heavy elements
is intimately linked to neutrons stars. So one, a very massive star
more massive than 20 times the mass of our Sun
collapses. In the core basically the remanant that becomes
the neutron star. Its extremely hot and very high densities.
So one model is that basically these elements can be produced in supernova
explosions.
The model of neutron star production has
basically encountered lots of problems in terms of whether or not it can
actually make
the necessary conditions
I've been working on an alternative model that has significant gained popularity
in the past five years which is actually a little more extreme.
So the ingredients are
two neutron stars and in fact fifty percent of stars actually live in pairs
and they're orbiting around each other
now because these objects are so dense they actually the space and time
and when they touch each other that generates billion of degree heat
very high density and they eject mass and we believe
in that ejection they produce about Jupiter mass of pure gold that is
ejected
into the external medium and we believe that in fact that may be the main
channel
to produce gold and other heavy elements.