r-process tagged posts

In our sun’s neighborhood of the Milky Way Galaxy is a relatively bright star, and in it, astronomers have been able to identify the widest range of elements in a star beyond our solar system yet.

The study, led by University of Michigan astronomer Ian Roederer, has identified 65 elements in the star, HD222925. Forty-two of the elements identified are heavy elements that are listed along the bottom of the periodic table of elements.

Identifying these elements in a single star will help astronomers understand what’s called the “rapid neutron capture process,” or one of the major ways by which heavy elements in the universe were created...

Neutron star. Credit: NASA

A team of scientists from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests a solution to the Galactic radioactive plutonium puzzle. All the Plutonium used on Earth is artificially produced in nuclear reactors. Still, it turns out that it is also produced in nature. “The origin of heavy elements produced in nature through rapid neutron capture (‘r-process’) by seed nuclei is one of the current nucleosynthesis mysteries,” Dr Hotokezaka, Prof Piran and Prof Paul from the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem said in their letter. Plutonium is a radioactive element. Its longest-lived isotope is plutonium-244 with a lifetime of 120 million years.

Detection of plutonium-244 in nature would imply that the element was synthesized in astrophysical ph...