Scientists Just Discovered a New Source of Gold in an Unexpected Place – Science Enséñame

Gold is one of the most sought-after metals in the world, but the formation of heavy metals like gold, thorium and uranium requires energetic conditions, such as stellar explosions or collisions between neutron stars. This means that all heavy elements found on Earth were formed under extreme conditions in astrophysical environments.

Today, astrophysicists do not have a complete understanding of how elements heavier than iron are formed. Researchers are intrigued by the question of which of these astrophysical events provides the right conditions for the formation of heavier elements. Surprisingly, New study It shows that these elements can form in the accretion disks of black holes.

An accretion disk is the swirling chaos that surrounds a newborn active black hole, as it swallows dust and gas from the space around it. In these extreme environments, the high neutrino emission rate should make it easier to convert protons into neutrons, potentially leading to an increase in the latter, which is exactly what is needed for the process that produces heavy elements.

“In our study, we systematically investigated for the first time the neutron and proton conversion rates for a large number of disk configurations using complex computer simulations, and found that disks are very rich in neutrons as long as certain conditions are met.” Explains Dr. Oliver Gast, from the Relativistic Astrophysics Group of the GSI Theory Research Division.

He just says That: The decisive factor is the total mass of the disk. “The larger the disk, the more often neutrons are formed from protons by electron capture under neutrino emission, and are available for the synthesis of heavy elements through the r-process.”

Conversely, if the disk mass is very high, the reverse reaction plays a more important role, so that neutrinos are recaptured to a greater extent by neutrinos before they leave the disk. These neutrinos are converted back into protons, making rapid neutron capture or r-process difficult.

The study suggests that the optimal mass for a disk to become a factory for gold and other heavy materials is between 0.01 and 0.1 solar masses. Since it is currently unclear whether and how often such accretion disks occur in collapsed systems, the research remains inconclusive.

“These data are currently insufficient. But with the next generation of accelerators, such as the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR), it will be possible to measure them with unprecedented precision in the future.” He said Astrophysicist Andreas Bauwein, from the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research.

It is known that a large number of elements are produced inside stars, but when we move to elements heavier than iron, catastrophic events are literally resorted to. One of the most extreme events occurs during the birth of black holes. However, astrophysicists are not sure whether the conditions are actually met, apart from their relative contributions to the total abundance of heavy elements in the universe.

The team has done a lot of hard work, using simulations to determine whether this is indeed the case. Rhetorically, we could call it the magic moment when astrophysics and computation come together to trace the history of objects we share today, but as we’ve seen, its origins lie in cosmic events that also include exotic black holes.

The research was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.