Capturing neutrons in the thin disk
Elements heavier than iron are forged by neutron-capture processes. How are they distributed in the Galaxy?
And now, the smallest star ever.
Read on to learn more about the discovery of the smallest star ever seen.
The Milky Way’s Fossil Record: Where did our Star-Stuff Come From?
The authors use measurements of heavy element abundances to study the history of how and when the Milky Way became enriched in heavy elements. Specifically, they are concerned with elements formed through slow and fast neutron capture.
Shifting the Pillars – Constraining Lithium Production in Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
Solar neutrinos constrain the origin of the elements in the Big Bang.
Making Lanthanide Metals…or Not
There aren’t many places in the universe that you can find a bunch of free neutrons not already trapped inside a nucleus—except in neutron stars. Luckily, neutron stars in violent mergers with other neutron stars, or with black holes, tend to disperse a little bit of their matter into the interstellar medium. Tidal forces eject some matter as the two objects swing around each other in their final orbits. Then, if an accretion disk forms, winds blown off the surface of the disk disperse even more matter. Surman and her colleagues look at the nucleosynthesis that occurs in this latter process, and find something surprising.
W49B: A Jet-Driven Supernova?
The authors discuss the possibility that the strangely-shaped supernova remnant W49B was created by a core-collapse supernova that formed strong bipolar jets instead of a spherical shockwave.