China-US astronomy team may have found possible relic of a recent ‘gold factory’

A mysterious glow of high-energy light in our Milky Way galaxy could be the remains of an extremely rare cosmic “gold factory”, according to a new study by Chinese and US researchers. The collision of two orbiting neutron stars – dead stars so dense that a teaspoon of their matter would weigh a billion tonnes – may have shone as brightly as Jupiter in the sky, they wrote in a paper posted last week on the preprint server arXiv, which has yet to be peer-reviewed. The violent smash spewed out...