The wildest scientific discoveries of 2017

Scientists witnessed how all the gold and platinum in the universe formed.

An illustration of a neutron star collision creating platinum, gold, and other precious heavy elements.Fermilab

The formation of a cool $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of gold happened when two super-small, super-dense stars smashed into each other 130 million light years away from Earth, researchers discovered.

The crash also produced huge stores of silver and platinum.

The finding, reported by a group of 4,000 very excited astronomers in October, came from scientists’ first-ever sighting of two neutron stars colliding.

The two massive, exploded stars hit each other at one-third the speed of light, and created gravitational waves. Scientific instruments on Earth picked up the waves from that crash, an event astronomers say only happens once every 100,000 years.