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supernova head

It seems and then elementary: where practice the elements come from? Nosotros tin can study the individual constituents that make up the classical elements of the periodic table, and we can certainly do cool things with those elements, merely their origins have remained at least somewhat uncertain, on the level of elementary particles. Science has long known that fusing particles together into atoms heavier than almost lead requires then much energy that it could not realistically be done anywhere other than the most violent astronomical events, like supernovae. Evidence supporting or updating this basic theory has been hard to come by, withal, since fifty-fifty the Big Hadron Collider can't create high enough energies to make such elements here on Earth.

Just recent piece of work from MIT's Kavli Plant looking at afar stars may have provided some of the evidence we need — and the results are non what physicists expected. Signals collected from the brightest stars in a tiny galaxy chosen Reticulum Ii show far college concentrations of heavy elements than theorized. That's fascinating to nuclear physicists, simply it as well have implications for the evolution of the early universe. In a recent round tabular array discussion of their work, the researchers claim that studies like this, into some of the smallest-scale processes in the universe, could help reveal the origin of some of the largest structures known.

r process 2

An creative person's conception of a supernova forging heavy elements. Credit: Akihiro Ikeshita/Naotsugu Mikami

R-procedure elements are those heavy elements that are formed by "rapid" processes, most likely at the heart of a collapsing star or in the collision of two neutron stars. They include lead, platinum, and uranium, but in the instance of Reticulum 2 information technology seems that gold and europium are king. Just why the brightest stars in the nearby dwarf galaxy seem to be such stellar gold mines is not even so known, but we practice know they couldn't have made those elements themselves; they're merely not hot enough.

"When nosotros read off the r-process content of that offset star in our telescope, it just looked wrong, like it could not have come out of this galaxy," said MIT graduate student Alex Ji. "I spent a long time making sure the telescope was pointed at the correct star."

These MIT scientists believe they can testify that the r-process elements they're looking at formed from the collision of ii neutron stars, at some point long in Reticulum II's by. The elements created in the pressurized furnace of this catastrophic event then "seeded" Reticulum II, leading to the current readings.

r process 2

What's about interesting is that the astronomers recall their results imply that almost r-process elements come from neutron star mergers. They also recall their report could imply that Reticulum Two got seeded with all its r-process elements from a single neutron star collision, pregnant larger galaxies might also have gotten all their r-process elements from a very small number every bit well.which means that a whole lot of the stuff that nosotros humans think of as stuff, from metallic rocks to xenon gas, come up from just a very few spectacular events. It might seem like there's an awful lot of heavy material in the universe, just the reality is that the universe is almost entirely either hydrogen or helium — the Sun, for example, is is merely one part gold per billion.