An international team of researchers led by scientists from the University of North Carolina has found that ancient stars in the universe were able to produce elements with atomic masses greater than any element we know in the periodic table now, which improves scientists’ understanding of the nature of stars and their evolution.
Process R
According to the study published by this team in the journal Science, researchers studied heavy elements in 42 well-studied stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, and these elements were formed by the rapid neutron capture process, or the “R process.”
Upon conducting a statistical analysis, it became clear that some elements, such as silver and rhodium, in those stars were most likely the remains of the fission of heavier elements. Additional calculations showed that these unknown elements are heavier than the heaviest element that scientists now know in nature, or even in nuclear weapons tests.
Fast neutron capture occurs in extreme astrophysical environments, such as supernovas or neutron star mergers, and is responsible for the formation of elements heavier than iron, such as gold, platinum, uranium, and many other elements found in trace amounts in the universe.
For decades, this process has been a big mystery to researchers, as its conditions are very extreme, and there is no knowledge available about the number of different types of places in the universe that can generate processes of this type, and scientists do not know how it ends.
(Watch in the following video from NASA the explosion of a star as it appears to us on Earth)
Star dust
All the elements we know originate from the interior of stars in the first place, where hydrogen atoms fuse together in the nucleus of any star, such as the sun, to turn into helium, and this remains the case until the stars run out of hydrogen fuel, in which case the stars tend to turn red and swell to the point that they were the size of a grain. Peas would have become the size of a handball, for example.
In this case, the helium accumulated in the interior of the star also begins nuclear fusion, during which it turns into larger elements, namely carbon and oxygen, for example. Even if the star is more than eight times more massive than the sun, these elements continue to fuse with each other, and new elements are generated one at a time. After another.
But when the star reaches the stage of producing iron, it is unable to fuse iron atoms because that requires more energy than it possesses. Here the star collapses in on itself and explodes in the form of a supernova. During this explosion, the heat is great enough to generate elements heavier than iron, such as iron and silver. .
At that point, the process of capturing fast neutrons begins, and here the current research work stops, as it was difficult for scientists to study the neutron capture processes that happen after iron, but by resorting to studying the current elements that represent the remains of those ancient elements, they were able to learn about them.
According to an official statement issued by the University of North Carolina, monitoring the impact of these elements in space gives scientists guidance on how to think about newer physical models of nuclear fusion and fission processes, and can give them insight into how the rich diversity of elements appears in this universe.
