The European Southern Observatory (ESO) reports the registration of an event whose significance from a scientific point of view is difficult to overestimate. For the first time, the formation of a heavy element in the collision of neutron stars has been registered.
It is known that the processes during which elements are formed occur mainly in the interiors of ordinary stars, in supernova explosions, or in the outer shells of old luminaries. However, until now it was not clear how the so-called capture of fast neutrons occurs, in which the heaviest elements of the periodic table are formed. Now this gap has been filled.
In 2017, after detecting gravitational waves reaching Earth, the observatory pointed its telescopes in Chile at their source: the neutron star merger GW170817, according to ESO. And now, thanks to the X-shooter receiver on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), it was possible to establish that heavy elements are formed during such events.
βAfter the GW170817 event, the ESO fleet of telescopes began monitoring the evolving kilonova outburst over a wide range of wavelengths. In particular, a series of kilonova spectra from the ultraviolet to the near infrared region was obtained on the X-shooter spectrograph. Already the initial analysis of these spectra suggested the presence of lines of heavy elements in them, but only now have astronomers been able to identify individual elements, βthe ESO publication says.
It turned out that strontium was formed as a result of the collision of neutron stars. Thus, the "missing link" in the riddle of the formation of chemical elements is filled.
Source: 3dnews.ru