[HN Gopher] Ancient Stars Made Extraordinarily Heavy Elements (2...
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       Ancient Stars Made Extraordinarily Heavy Elements (2023)
        
       Author : samch
       Score  : 38 points
       Date   : 2024-01-09 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (news.ncsu.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (news.ncsu.edu)
        
       | GMoromisato wrote:
       | Still rooting for an Island of Stability:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
        
         | JumpCrisscross wrote:
         | I raise you a continent [1].
         | 
         | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent_of_stability
        
       | dotancohen wrote:
       | The headline goes a bit far. They postulate that some elements,
       | e.g. silver, are the result of the fission of extraordinarily
       | high atomic number elements. There are no actual observations of
       | such elements.
        
         | kstrauser wrote:
         | Do we have the technology to observe such elements if they
         | could even possibly exist? I'd guess they'd be the sort of
         | ephemera that would take a gazillion eV to form, then would
         | decay a femtosecond later.[0] If so, creating an atom in the
         | lab may be outside our engineering skills today.
         | 
         | [0] Not a physicist. Not your physicist. Not FDA approved
         | medical advice.
        
           | pfdietz wrote:
           | We've made elements up to mass number 294.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheavy_element
           | 
           | However, the specific isotopes made in the r-process are very
           | neutron rich, right up to the neutron drip line, and I don't
           | believe we've made many of them.
        
       | pjungwir wrote:
       | Something I've been curious about lately is: why do we find
       | elements on Earth clumped together, for example veins of iron or
       | gold? I can understand coal or oil since that comes from
       | something organic that put it there. But what about elemental
       | substances? When I throw stuff into my blender or spice mixer it
       | gets pretty homogeneous. Surely an exploding star ought to mix
       | things up better than that. So is there something that brings the
       | iron & gold back together again? I don't know if this is a
       | question for an astrophysicist, chemist, or geologist, but I
       | suppose HN has all three. :-)
        
         | colordrops wrote:
         | There are plenty of phenomena in life where things clump
         | together. Just look at oil and water, or different sand
         | particle sizes when shook together in a container. It's going
         | to be something similar at a cosmic scale.
        
         | javajosh wrote:
         | I have always assumed that such metals came in big blobs and
         | then got smeared out over geological time. Could be wrong
         | though.
        
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