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Astronomers have been trying to determine the origins of the universe, such as gold, for decades. Now, new research based on signals revealed in archival space mission data may point to potential cues: magnets, or highly magnetized neutron stars.
Scientists believe that lighter elements like hydrogen and helium, as well as small amounts of lithium, are likely to exist early on after the Big Bang created the universe 13.8 billion years ago.
The exploding stars then released heavier elements like iron, which were incorporated into newborns and planets. However, the distribution of gold, heavier than iron, casts a mystery to astrophysicists throughout the universe.
“This is a rather basic question in terms of the origins of complex issues in the universe,” said Anildo Patel, the lead author of the study published Tuesday in Astrophysical Journal Letters and a doctoral student in physics at Columbia University in New York City. “It’s a fun puzzle that’s not really solved.”
Previously, gold space production was only linked to neutron star collisions.
Astronomers observed a collision between two neutron stars in 2017. The violent collision emitted ripples in space-time, known as gravitational waves, and emitted light from gamma-ray bursts. The collision event, known as Kironova, also created heavy elements such as gold, platinum and leads. Kironova is likened to a gold factory in space.
Co-authors of Eric Burns, an assistant professor and astrophysicist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, co-authors of Eric Burns, believe that most neutron stars mergers only occurred in the past hundreds of millions of years.
But previously, 20 years ago data from NASA and the European Space Agency telescopes suggest that flares from magnetors, which were formed much earlier during the childhood of space, may have provided an alternative way to create gold, Burns said.
Neutron stars are core remnants from the exploded stars, and they are so dense that a teaspoon of stars weighs 1 billion tonnes on Earth. Magnetors are a very bright type of neutron star with an incredibly powerful magnetic field.
Astronomers are still trying to solve exactly how magnets form, but Burns said it is likely that the first star appeared just after the first star, or about 13.6 billion years ago, within about 200 million years of the universe’s beginning.
Occasionally, Magnetar unleashes a jackpot of radiation for “Starcast.”
On Earth, the Earth’s melting core causes the movement of the planet’s crust, causing earthquakes to occur and sufficient stress build up, causing volatile movements, or the ground to tremble under the feet. According to Burns, Starcooki is similar.
“Nutron stars have a crust and a superfluid core,” Burns said in an email. “Moving beneath the surface can stress the surface and ultimately cause star cakes. In magnetores, these stark cakes produce very short bursts of X-rays.
Researchers found evidence suggesting that magnetors release material during the giant flare, but they had no physical explanation for the exhaustion of star masses, Patel said.
A recent study found that it can burn and release skin heat at high speeds, according to a few new researchers, including Patel’s advisor Brian Metzger, a New York City physics professor, and Patel’s advisor Brian Metzger, a senior research scientist at the Flatiron Institute in New York City.
“They hypothesized that the physical conditions for this explosive mass emissions are promising for the production of heavy elements,” Patel said.
The researchers wanted to know if there could be a link between radiation from magnetor flares and the formation of heavy elements. Scientists searched for evidence of visible and ultraviolet wavelengths. But Burns wondered whether the flare might produce traceable gamma rays.
He saw gamma ray data from the giant magnetar flares that appeared in December 2004 and was photographed by the now-retired integration or the international Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Institute Mission. Astronomers had found and characterized the signal, but at that point they had no idea how to interpret it, Burns said.
Predictions from the model proposed by Metzger’s previous work closely matched the signals from the 2004 data. The gamma rays are similar to what the team proposed how the creation and distribution of emphasis would look like in a massive magnetar flare.
Data from NASA’s retired Rhessi or the Reven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager also supported the team’s findings. Long-term funded research has made discoveries possible, Burns said.
“When we first built the model and made the forecast in December 2024, we didn’t know that the signal was already in the data. And we couldn’t imagine the theoretical model fitted very well with the data. It was a very exciting holiday season for all of us,” Patel said. “It’s very cool to think about how some of my phones and my laptops were forged in this extreme explosion over the course of the Galaxy history.”
Dr. Eleonoratroja, an associate professor at the University of Rome who led the discovery of the x-rays emitted by neutron star collisions in 2017, said the evidence of critical elements from the Magnetaral event “is not comparable to the evidence collected in 2017.” Toroja was not involved in the new research.
“The production of gold from this magnetaru is a possible explanation for its gamma ray glow, and it seems to be an honest discussion at the end of it, among many others,” Troja said.
Troja added that magnetors are “very messy objects.” Given that producing gold can be a tricky process that requires certain conditions, magnetors can add too many wrong components, such as excess electrons, to the mix, leading to photometals such as zirconium and silver, rather than gold or uranium.
“Therefore, I will not say that a new source of gold has been discovered,” Troja said. “In fact, what is proposed is an alternative pathway for its production.”
Researchers believe the magnetor’s giant flares are responsible for up to 10% of the heavier elements in the Milky Way galaxy, but future missions could provide a more accurate estimate, Patel said.
NASA’s Compton Spectrometer and Imager Mission (COSI, scheduled to be released in 2027) may follow up on this finding. The wide field gamma ray telescope is designed to observe giant magnetoresistive flares and identify elements created within them. Telescopes could help astronomers search for sources of other potential heavy elements throughout the universe, Patel said.