heavy elements tagged posts

Image of our sun showing dark sunspots and bright diffuse faculae (best seen around the edges). A new study shows how the larger mix of heavy elements leave such spots unchanged, while increasing the contrast of the bright diffuse faculae. Credit: NASA/SDO

The spots on the surface on the Sun come and go with an 11-year periodicity known as the solar cycle. The solar cycle is driven by the solar dynamo, which is an interplay between magnetic fields, convection and rotation. However, our understanding of the physics underlying the solar dynamo is far from complete. One example is the Maunder Minimum, a period in the 17th century, where spots almost disappeared from the surface of the Sun for a period of over 50 years.

Now, a large international team has found a star that can help shed light ...

1. The theory that primordial black holes collide with neutron stars to create heavy elements explains the lack of neutron stars in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a long-standing mystery. Credit: University of California, Los Angeles
2. A black hole captured by a neutron star. Credit: Alexander Kusenko/UCLA

UCLA physicists have proposed new theories for how the universe’s first black holes might have formed and the role they might play in the production of heavy elements such as gold, platinum and uranium. A long-standing question in astrophysics is whether the universe’s very first black holes came into existence less than a second after the Big Bang or whether they formed only millions of years later during the deaths of the earliest stars.

Alexander Kusenko, a UCLA professor of phys...

Rolf Chini has been researching approximately 400 stars in the vicinity of the sun that share some of the sun’s properties for many years. In the process, he and his team have made a very interesting discovery. Credit: © RUB, Nelle

49 Lib, a relatively bright star in the southern sky, is 12 billion years old rather than just 2.3 billion. For many decades, researchers were stumped by conflicting data pertaining to this celestial body, because they had estimated it as much younger than it really is. Determining its age anew, astronomers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have now resolved all inconsistencies. “It had previously been assumed that the star was only half as old as our sun,” says Chini. “However, our data have shown that it had been formed at the time that our galaxy was born...

Spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are shown in the center, surrounded by the circumgalactic medium, which appears as black to our eyes. However, the circumgalactic medium contains very hot gas, shown in red, orange, and white that outweighs the central galaxies. The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope is an ultra-violet spectrograph that can probe these gaseous filaments and clumps. Credit: Adrien Thob, LJMU

Galaxies “waste” large amounts of heavy elements generated by star formation by ejecting them up to a million light years away into their surrounding halos and deep space, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder...