Thanks for the reply. This is for a story I'm writing, which I want to be as physically accurate as possible, but I'm not a physicist...
A couple follow on questions if that's ok (I've googled but not quite found the answers):
Could any stellar event produce about an Earth's mass of gold?
If...
Would it be in any way physically possible for a binary star system to evaporate / explode, leaving behind two spheres of a solid metal such as gold (or an alloy), which were then rigid enough to drift together and maintain their shapes, rather than just collapsing into a larger sphere?
And...