Researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory studied a nuclear reaction and measured conditions that can explain how heavy elements are formed inside stars. Stars are mainly composed of light ...

Understanding the origin of heavy elements on the periodic table is one of the most challenging open problems in all of physics. In the search for conditions suitable for these elements via ...

How heavy can an element be? An international team of researchers has found that ancient stars were capable of producing elements with atomic masses greater than 260, heavier than any element on the ...

Research by scientists in South Africa and India is shedding light on the nuclear processes that lead to the formation of heavy elements after the collision of neutron stars, and why those elements ...

For the first time, a freshly made heavy element, strontium, has been detected in space, in the aftermath of a merger of two neutron stars. This finding was observed by ESO’s X-shooter spectrograph on ...

All around us are elements forged in stars, from the nickel and copper in coins to the gold and silver in jewelry. Scientists have a good understanding of how these elements form: In many cases, a ...

The formation of small worlds like Earth previously was thought to occur mostly around stars rich in heavy elements such as iron and silicon. However, new ground-based observations, combined with data ...

In an ejection that would have caused its rotation to slow, a magnetar is depicted losing material into space in this artist’s concept. The magnetar’s strong, twisted magnetic field lines (shown in ...