Thread by @BadAstronomer

A new study shows that *just* before the solar system formed, a pair of neutron stars may have collided and exploded, blasting us with material from a distance of only 1000 light years away!

syfy.com/syfywire/a-nea…

2/ What does this mean? Well, for one thing, if something like this were to happen today, the light from it would be bright enough to cast shadows, despite being *10 quadrillion kilometers* (10,000,000,000,000,000) away.

3/ I’m unclear on the exact physical effects on us. 1,000 light years is pretty far, though, and even a full-blown supernova probably wouldn’t hurt us from that distance. This would be a “kilonova”; powerful but not as much as a supernova. So it’s unlikely to do much.

4/ By that I mean prompt, immediate effects. The explosion would blast material away at a decent fraction of the speed of light. It would slow over time, but still some small amount of that material would get to us, many tens of thousands of years later.

5/ But it *would* reach us eventually. That’s what the scientists in this new work think may have happened right before the gas cloud collapsed to form our planet. We were peppered with debris from this event.

So what does this mean for you?

6/ Do you have any gold jewelry? Look at it: Break it down into its individual atoms. Count them. Now ponder this: 3 out of every 1000 of those gold atoms may have come from that single event: 2 neutron stars merging to become a black hole.

You’re wearing exploded neutron star.

7/ Mind you this is all based on models using physics. It’s not proven; it’s one possible scenario given what we know about neutron star collisions and how often they occur. So we can’t say “this collision occurred.” Only that it might have.

8/ So while we can’t know if this happened for sure or not, it’s still a step forward in understanding how our Earth came to be. We get ideas, play with them, apply math and physics to them, and see if they are possible. Maybe they’re right, maybe not.

9/ If not, OK; maybe the next idea will be better. Or maybe it just needs a bit of tweaking.

But all of this leads to what we came here for: Understanding.

I love that we can look around, use our brains, and figure out things that happened billions of years ago.

#SCIENCE

10/ And it helps us understand that we are fundamentally tied to the cosmos, literally part of it; the atoms that make us *us* came from deep space and deep time. I love that part.

11/11 As a reminder, here is what started me thinking about this today: syfy.com/syfywire/a-nea…

We are all space. All of us.

/fin