The world looks different after the big neutron star collision discovery
My grandmother died in 2013.
She was a stubborn, brilliant woman who ardently believed in the value of science. She came of age in Brooklyn, but I knew her as my Nana in Los Angeles who worked with dinosaur bones.
When she died, my grandfather gave me one of Nana's necklaces: A jade stone with a gold chain. I wear it most days.
After today, I will look at that necklace differently.
While the jade stone on Nana's necklace was forged in the high heat and pressure of the Earth -- an appropriate tribute to Nana's roots as a geologist -- the gold of the necklace she once wore is alien in origin.
A discovery announced Monday and made by thousands of scientists around the world, shows that the gold on Earth was actually created as a byproduct of the cataclysmic collisions of neutron stars -- the city-sized stellar remnants that can contain more mass than the sun.
This means that Earth's gold, silver, platinum, and uranium, among other heavy metals, were likely formed during cosmic crashes of neutron-dense stars that represent the leftovers of supernova explosions.
It's a rare moment when a scientific discovery truly and fundamentally alters the way you think about our world. It's even more unusual when a finding makes you reevaluate your feelings about the jewelry around your neck.
And it's not just the necklace.
There are also the atoms of the rose gold ring my now-husband gave me when he asked me to marry him on a cold April day in Brooklyn's Prospect Park in 2015. They, too, were also likely the result of crashing neutron stars in the distant cosmos.
The gold on my finger and around my neck probably started out as the radioactive fallout from some of the most intense explosions in the known universe.
These precious metals, which we mine from the Earth for cell phones, jewelry, and so many other uses, are finite on this planet after being born in the stars.
While these materials were created in the most extreme ways, we use them in the most mundane.
That's perhaps the most apropos truth of all: We use these heavy elements for very human means, from connecting with one another via text or on a phone call, to representing a commitment or memory.
The truth is that in some way, every piece of us -- all of our atoms -- were born elsewhere in the universe.
As scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan once said: "The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
This week, I think we're getting to know ourselves pretty well.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
