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Physicists start to pin down how stars forge heavy atoms
The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan.
In the basement of FRIB sits a particle accelerator the length of about one and a half football fields, comprised of a string of 46 sage green super-cooled containers arranged in the shape of a paper clip. From left: Antonios Kontos, Hendrik Schatz, Zach Meisel and Fernando Montes gather around the instruments at FRIB that are used to restage the same nuclear reactions that occur inside stars. So far, the results seem to draw a circle right where Spyrou and her colleagues had hoped: The relative abundances of lanthanum, barium and europium match what was seen in those carbon-enhanced, metal-poor stars that so puzzled astrophysicists in the early 2000s.
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