Elements heavier than iron, such as gold and uranium, are primarily formed through neutron capture processes, specifically the rapid neutron capture process (r-process). The r-process, unlike the ...

Chemistry in the first 50 million to 100 million years after the Big Bang may have been more active than we expected.

JERUSALEM, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- A new study has found that most massive stars in the early universe formed as binary systems, meaning they were born in pairs, similar to the way many massive stars form ...

But even the mass of a brown dwarf isn't enough to overcome the Coulomb barrier and start up stellar fusion. Fusion takes so much energy that some elements, up to the atomic mass of iron, are only ...

How the first stars formed from dust and gas has been a burning question for years, but a state-of-the-art computer simulation now offers the most detailed picture yet of how these first stars in ...

Astronomers have detected the first-ever signs of nuclear fission happening in stars, a discovery that sheds light on how elements heavier than those found naturally on Earth form in the cosmos ...

Astronomers have seen a lot of stars explode, but one unusual stellar death is forcing them to rethink what they thought they ...

Astronomers studying how elements heavier than iron were produced in the early Milky Way have identified a distinct series of epochs of galaxy-wide chemical formation. This evolutionary timeline ...

Ultimately, astronomers are undecided about how such elements are formed—in supernova explosions, which are relatively common, or in something rare and exotic, such as the merger of neutron stars.

The scientists searched for evidence of these particularly ancient stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud and catalogued ten of them, first with the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite and then with ...