1. What Is Life?
"They're basically big cookers," said Richard Mushotsky, an XMM project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "They cook the original elements like hydrogen and helium and they make them into all the stuff that we learned about in chemistry class - carbon, nitrogen, iron, etc.".
"We astronomers are fond of saying that every atom we exist of once-upon-a-time lived in the center of a star that exploded like this," added Mushotsky. "So what both XMM and Chandra are able to do with exquisite accuracy is actually measure and map these elements.".
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But what about the heavier elements such as gold and platinum? The answer may lie in yet another of the more violent events in the Universe: collisions between superdense neutron stars. "Probably many of the heavy elements we're familiar with on Earth were made in this way," says Stephan Rosswog of the University of Leicester.
Shortly after the big bang, the Universe contained only the light elements, hydrogen and helium. When these materials later formed stars, heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen were forged in the stars' nuclear furnaces. And even heavier elements were created when very massive stars exploded as supernovae. Such explosions also blast debris into space where another generation of stars and planets form, but when it comes to the heaviest elements, such as gold and platinum, astronomers are not sure that supernovae can create enough of them. Most of these metals must be made in a nuclear reaction called the 'reprocess", in which a nucleus consumes many neutrons in quick succession. 'You would need much more extreme conditions than you get in supernova simulations," says Rosswog. He suspected the reprocess might flourish during collisions between neutron stars, the collapsed remains of stellar cores left behind after some supernova explosions. Sometimes two neutron stars orbit each other, and they can spiral ever closer together before eventually merging in a violent explosion.
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