Scientists find answer to vast puzzle about the universe in the middle of two colliding stars
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Your support makes all the difference.Scientists have found the answer to a decades-long mystery, in the middle of two colliding stars.
For the first ever time, a newly made heavy element called strontium was detected in space after two neutron stars crashed into each other.
The discovery definitively confirms that heavier elements in the universe can be made in the mergers of neutron stars, at last helping answer the puzzle of how chemical elements form.
Since the middle of the last century, researchers have understood how physical processes create the elements that make up the world around us. They went on to find the places in the universe where these are found – with the exception of one.
"This is the final stage of a decades-long chase to pin down the origin of the elements," said the study's lead author Darach Watson from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
"We know now that the processes that created the elements happened mostly in ordinary stars, in supernova explosions, or in the outer layers of old stars. But, until now, we did not know the location of the final, undiscovered process, known as rapid neutron capture, that created the heavier elements in the periodic table."
The element that researchers saw being formed, strontium, is found naturally in the soil. It is probably best known for providing the salts that allow fireworks to include red colours.
The story of watching the process began in 2017, when scientists spotted the first ever gravitational wave. When they did, telescopes around the world turned towards its source: named GW170817, it was a neutron star merger deep in space.
If heavier elements were created when neutron stars collided, scientists thought they would be able to see evidence of them in kilonovae, which are left behind from those mergers.
It was looking in data taken at that time that researchers spotted the elements that were left behind.
"By reanalysing the 2017 data from the merger, we have now identified the signature of one heavy element in this fireball, strontium, proving that the collision of neutron stars creates this element in the Universe," said Watson.
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