How are heavy elements formed in the universe? Extremely neutron-rich atomic nuclei and their beta-decay rates play an important role in this process. Until now, it has been very difficult to ...

Four and a half billion years ago, after Earth’s fiery birth, the infant planet began to radically reshape itself, separating into distinct layers. Metals — mostly iron with a bit of nickel — fell ...

Violent explosions of massive, magnetized stars may forge most of the universe’s heavy elements, such as silver and uranium. The ancient star’s elements aren’t from the remnants of a neutron star ...

The International Gamma-ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL), a space-science mission led by the European Space Agency, launched successfully on October 17, 2002, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in ...

Deep observations of two X-ray bright clusters of galaxies with ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite allowed a group of international astronomers to measure their chemical composition with an unprecedented ...

Europium is the key for understanding the formation of the heavy elements by the fast neutron capture process, the so-called r-process. This is crucial both for the formation of half of the elements ...