The most abundant elements found in nature, such as oxygen and carbon, are seen throughout the universe, the products of exploding stars known as supernovas.
Scientists agree that exploding stars produced most of the materials found on earth.
Now, a team from the Universities of Leicester, England, and Basel, Switzerland, led by Stephan Rosswog, has reported to the U.K. National Astronomy Meeting, sponsored by the Royal Astronomical Society, its theory about how heavy elements like gold and platinum were produced. Rosswog's team believes that the universe's heaviest elements were formed by violent collisions of super-dense neutron stars. N.Y. According to Rosswog, neutron stars are often found in pairs and collide when they are too close to each other. When a violent collision occurs, an enormous amount of energy is released and large quantities of gold and platinum are tossed into space. Although a typical final explosion only takes a few milliseconds, modeling the event's outcome took Rosswog and his team several weeks of calculations using the world's fastest supercomputers.