Physicists Start To Pin Down How Stars Forge Heavy Atoms

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) may not glitter quite like the night sky, plunked as it is between Michigan State University's chemistry department and the performing arts center. Inside, though, the lab is teeming with substances that are otherwise found only in stars.

Here, atomic nuclei accelerate to half the speed of light, smash into a target and shatter into smithereens. The collisions create some of the same rare, unstable isotopes that arise inside stars and which, through a sequence of further reactions, end up as heavy elements.

FRIB scientists have been re-creating the recipe.

People like to do DNA tests to see where their ancestors came from," said Artemisia Spyrou, a nuclear astrophysicist at FRIB. We're doing the same with our planet and solar system."

Scientists have a solid understanding of how stars forge the elements on the periodic table up to iron. But the processes that give rise to heavier elements - zinc, lead, barium, gold and the rest - are more elusive.

Now, tangible results have emerged in a field replete with postulates and presumptions. The FRIB lab is currently replicating one of the three main processes by which heavy elements are thought to form, and homing in on where this intermediate neutron-capture process," or i-process, occurs.

The lab also plans to re-create one of the other two processes as well, the one that yields jewelry shop elements" such as platinum and gold.

This is a big, big jump forward in understanding how isotopes form. Then we can go backward and find the astrophysical sites with the right conditions," said John Cowan, who first theorized about the i-process as a graduate student in the 1970s. FRIB is doing some pioneering work."

Some 13.8 billion years ago, the newborn universe was a scorching soup of elementary particles, freshly forged in the Big Bang. As the cosmos cooled and expanded, these specks combined to form subatomic particles such as protons and neutrons, which combined to form hydrogen, helium and lithium - the first and lightest elements - during the universe's first three minutes. It would take another couple hundred million years for these elements to clump together into larger bodies and birth stars.

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