The origin of so-called “gold-rich” stars, or stars with an abundance of heavy elements other than iron, such as gold and platinum, has been revealed by a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame and Tohoku University.<\/p>\n
Modern telescopes all over the world have found hundreds of stars that are rich in gold. Where, how, and when these stars were created during the Milky Way’s, our galaxy’s, history remained a mystery.<\/p>\n
The team discovered that the majority of gold-rich stars originated in relatively small Milky Way<\/a> progenitor galaxies more than 10 billion years ago, providing new insight into the stars’ early history.<\/p>\n Astronomers have mostly studied the presence of heavy elements by looking at the spectra of stars and figuring out how much of each chemical there is. While many elements in stars are created during the core-collapse supernova of a massive star or the thermonuclear supernova<\/a> of a white dwarf, some elements appear to be created in even more unusual ways.<\/p>\n S-process enhanced and r-process enhanced stars, which stand for slow and rapid neutron capture, respectively, are examples of stars that contain these kinds of metals.<\/p>\n It is not known how r-process enhanced (RPE) stars are formed. The researchers examined a cosmological simulation of a Milky Way-like galaxy with r-process enrichment in this study.<\/p>\n The team used a numerical simulation to follow the Milky Way’s formation from the Big Bang to the present in order to come to this conclusion. This simulation has the highest time resolution ever achieved, allowing it to precisely resolve the material cycle formed by stars in the Milky Way.<\/p>\n The simulation was created over several months using the ATERUI II supercomputer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Center for Computational Science.<\/p>\nR-process Enhanced Stars<\/h2>\n
High-Resolution Simulation<\/h2>\n