sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Scientists have long suspected that neutron stars, the superdense remnants of burned out suns, are needed for this sort of rapid neutron capture. But until 2 years ago, they had never witnessed such an event. That’s when the GW170817 merger happened. Taking place 140 million light-years away, astronomers first detected it from the gravitational waves generated by the stars crashing together. Computer modeling revealed that strontium in the expanding ball of gas would absorb light at wavelengths of 350 and 850 nanometers. When they looked again at the X-shooter spectra, they found dips in the spectra at those wavelengths. The end result: five Earth masses worth of strontium. The work confirms that at least some of the heavier elements are produced by merging neutron stars, and that neutrons stars really are made of neutrons. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
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Source:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/10/23/2342242/some-of-the-universes-heavier-elements-are-created-by-neutron-star-collisions?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed