Physicists Have Figured Out the Most Extreme Chemical Factories In The Universe

As you all know that our world is full of chemicals which shouldn't exist. Lighter elements include carbon and oxygen and helium. They exist because of intense fusion energies crushing protons together inside stars. But elements from cobalt to nickel to copper, up through iodine and xenon, and including uranium and plutonium, are just very heavy to be produced by stellar fusion. Even the core of the biggest, brightest sun is not hot and pressurized enough to make anything heavier than iron.

The classic story was that supernovae which are the explosions responsible for tearing some stars apart at the end of their lives and they are the culprit. Those explosions should briefly reach energies which are intense enough for creating the heavier elements. The dominant theory for how this happens is turbulence. As the supernova tosses any material into the universe, the theory goes, ripples of turbulence pass through its winds and briefly compress outflung stellar material with enough force for slamming even fusion-resistant iron atoms into other atoms. This forms heavier elements. But according to a new fluid dynamics model, this is all wrong. The study lead author Snezhana Abarzhi, a materials scientist at the University of Western Australia in Perth said that in order to start this process they require to have some sort of excess of energy. She also added that people have believed for so many years that this sort of excess might be created by violent, fast processes, which might essentially be turbulent processes.

But Abarzhi along with her co-authors developed a model of the fluids in a supernova which suggests something else, something smaller which might be going on. They showcased their findings earlier this month in Boston, at the American Physical Society March meeting. They also published their findings on Nov. 26th, 2018 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In a supernova, stellar material blasts away from the core of the star at fast speed. But all that material is actually flowing outward at about the same speed. So relative to one another, the molecules in this stream of stellar material are not moving all that fast. While there may be the occasional ripple or eddy, there's not enough turbulence for creating molecules past iron on the periodic table.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.space.com/supernovas-mystery-possibly-solved.html