
Astronomers unravel a blast that sent ripples in space-time - kartikkumar
https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/astronomers-unravel-blast-sent-ripples-space-time
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Tehchops
> _" During such events, massive amounts of heavy metals are formed. This
> collision, for instance, produced a lump of gold with the mass of our planet
> in just a split second."_

We need to find a localized wormhole and go mine that.

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rev_null
How is gold created out of the collision of stars composed of neutrons?

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adrianN
If you smash proton and neutron clumps the size of stars together you get
fragments that are gold-sized.

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thaumasiotes
That makes a little more sense. The original quote suggests that a single very
large lump of gold was created, not a very large number of separate gold
atoms.

This raises the question of why gold tends to be found near other gold on
Earth.

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ohum
Is there an answer to that question? And, why is the distribution of matter
not random? Maybe some sort of gravitational grouping? (eg earth's iron core,
centrifugal enrichment of uranium). Or affinity for some orientation relative
to field states, magnetism/diamagnetism etc.?

Like attracts?

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CBLT
As I understand it, the distribution was decided when the earth was still hot.
So the mechanics you're interested in are those of high-temperature solutions
containing liquid gold, which I don't understand that much. There's other
interesting phenomena too, like gold frequently occurs in quartz rocks[0].

[0] [https://www.quora.com/Why-is-gold-frequently-located-in-
quar...](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-gold-frequently-located-in-quartz-
rock/answer/Gary-Clifton-1)

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A_No_Name_Mouse
"The vision of VLBI is so sharp that if people were playing table tennis on
the Moon we would see the moves of the ping pong ball. "

I was under the impression that a radio telescope could only take a single
pixel image. Are they using a different kind of receiver that can create a
complete image? If so, how can they still increase resolution using
interference?

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fspeech
I think he was talking about angular resolution. EM wave arrives at different
antennas at slightly different time. The phase difference allows for very high
resolution of the direction the wave is coming from.
[VLBI]([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-
baseline_interfero...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-
baseline_interferometry)) effectively produces an antenna with an aperture the
size of the Earth. To make it work one needs extremely accurate time
synchronization and spatial location. In the interview he talked about
continental drift of several millimeters per year. Those are the things they
need to compensate for.

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hi41
Kudos to the scientists, astronomers and engineers who made this possible.
This is so amazing. The reference to being able to see Ping balls on moon is
unbelievable. We have such brilliant people in our midst!

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maxnoe
To add another moon reference: A normal cell phone on the moon would be the
third brightest radio source in the sky.

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osheamonn
"In 2015 gravitational waves were detected that resulted from a collision of
supermassive black holes."

"The 2015 discovery was an event of another physical nature, much more
powerful than the 2017 one, as it included the collision of supermassive black
holes, each of the order of 100 millions of solar masses"

This is not true. GW150914 was from the collision of two black holes of ~30
solar masses each.

