Particularly the Aztecs believed that gold was actually sweat of the Sun

and they can actually pick up the pieces of the sweat of the Sun

it had of course a strong spiritual value because the God of Sun was a very

important component of the culture

what's interesting is of course that the gold was not created in the Sun

it has this beautiful properties that you know it's shiny

is yellow and it's natural to assign it to an origin in the Sun but

today one of the biggest mysteries is you know where gold come from and

in fact not only gold but a large fraction of their very precious elements such as titanium

silver

we still haven't figured out where they come that

what type of explosive phenomenon can make these heavy elements which require

probably the most extreme conditions in the universe, the highest densities

and the highest temperatures to make these elements and in fact the stars that I'm

more interested in are those sort of

rock stars which basically are extremely luminous but they just have very short

lifetimes

and when they die they produce this very very heavy neutron star

or black holes. And in fact if I take a cup

of neutron star matter it weighs as much as mount everest

the story of the formation of heavy elements

is intimately linked to neutrons stars. So one, a very massive star

more massive than 20 times the mass of our Sun

collapses. In the core basically the remanant that becomes

the neutron star. Its extremely hot and very high densities.

So one model is that basically these elements can be produced in supernova

explosions.

The model of neutron star production has

basically encountered lots of problems in terms of whether or not it can

actually make

the necessary conditions

I've been working on an alternative model that has significant gained popularity

in the past five years which is actually a little more extreme.

So the ingredients are

two neutron stars and in fact fifty percent of stars actually live in pairs

and they're orbiting around each other

now because these objects are so dense they actually the space and time

and when they touch each other that generates billion of degree heat

very high density and they eject mass and we believe

in that ejection they produce about Jupiter mass of pure gold that is

ejected

into the external medium and we believe that in fact that may be the main

channel

to produce gold and other heavy elements.