Was the Solar System born through a neutron star-neutron star merger?

http://astronomynow.com/2015/12/09/g...eavy-elements/

Heavy elements present at the dawn of the Solar System were produced
by a nearby merger of two neutron stars, which unleashed a powerful
gamma-ray burst, according to astronomers at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem.

Writing in the journal Nature Physics, Dr Kenta Hotokezaka, Professor
Tsvi Piran and Professor Michael Paul show how a significant quantity
of plutonium-244 found its way into the early Solar System following
the neutron star merger. None of this plutonium-244 remains in the
Solar System today, some four-and-a-half billion years later, but its
presence can be inferred. With a half-life of only 80 million years,
the plutonium-244 quickly decayed into more stable, daughter isotopes
of elements such as xeon, which can be found today in meteorites.

I remember reading some years back that there's a mystery about the
elements that make up the Solar System. Namely that it's possible that
two different types of supernovas were needed to seed our stellar nebula
when we were forming. That's because the types of elements we were
seeing couldn't come from only one type of supernova. Now it looks like
they're saying that not only did two different supernova happened in
close vicinity to each other, but then their neutron star remnants
spiralled into each other to form a black hole, which released still
more unusual elements! The chances of that happening are astronomical! I
guess it's a good thing that these are astronomical phenomena then.

Yousuf Khan

Dear Yousuf Khan:

On Thursday, December 10, 2015 at 2:03:36 AM UTC-7, Yousuf Khan wrote:
http://astronomynow.com/2015/12/09/g...eavy-elements/
....
I remember reading some years back that there's a
mystery about the elements that make up the Solar
System.

How many solar systems have we investigated, such that we would know the makeup of crustal elements of small rocky bodies?

I find it naive to be surprised here. We have to crank our various empirical engines to make predictions, with insufficient data for building them. I know it is "something to do" while waiting for interstellar travel to become a reality, but...

David A. Smith

On 10/12/2015 9:03 AM, dlzc wrote:
How many solar systems have we investigated, such that we would know
the makeup of crustal elements of small rocky bodies?

I find it naive to be surprised here. We have to crank our various
empirical engines to make predictions, with insufficient data for
building them. I know it is "something to do" while waiting for
interstellar travel to become a reality, but...

David A. Smith

I don't think it's really the geology that's at issue here, rather the
chemistry. Specifically the isotopic chemistry. They mentioned the one
thing in this article about Plutonium-244. Their models don't show this
isotope being produced in normal supernova explosions, but they believe
it can be produced in neutron star-neutron star collisions.

Here's an earlier report, where a different team doing similar analysis,
except this time tracing Iron-58 and Iron-60 in meteorites, came to a
different conclusion, that we weren't produced in a supernova explosion.

Our Solar System Formed From The Cumulative Ashes Of Countless Stars,
Not One Supernova | Popular Science
http://www.popsci.com/science/articl...ova-study-says

So which report to believe? Not sure, too much detective work involved.

Yousuf Khan