One of the big questions in our Universe is where the chemical elements heavier than iron come from, because they cannot be made by „cooking” them from lighter ones (thermonuclear fusion) in the cosmic cauldrons, the stars. Now it has been found that the necessary extreme conditions of density and temperature that are needed for alchemistic transformations like making gold from iron are provided in the collision of two neutron stars. In the lecture, this is explained on the example of the first observation of such an event by the gravitational wave detector LIGO. A computer simulation of merging neutron stars is presented which shows that the occurring extreme states of matter are similar to those created in collisions of atomic nuclei in terrestrial laboratories.
