On a clear night, if you were to travel outside of Dublin into the countryside, to an area relatively free of light pollution, and look up, you would be greeted with the inky dark night sky, dotted with billions upon billions of stars. Amongst the night sky you look at would be planets, galaxies, and invisible to your naked eyes, the answers to mysteries of the universe.
Without stars, life as we know it would not exist. All the elements in the universe,are made inside the cores of stars.
Within stars’ cores, light elements fuse together to create heavier elements. For most of a star’s life, these fusion reactions consist of hydrogen fusing to create helium. As a star ages, the amount of hydrogen decreases as it has been used up and fusion occurs with helium atoms making heavier elements. Larger stars are capable of producing heavier elements through nuclear fusion. When stars explode, the elements are released and become part of the universe.
We, and all we know, are made of stardust.
As nuclear reactions in stars’ cores create heavier and heavier elements, the stars inevitably burst, and calculations have shown that stars reach exploding point before they would have been able to create heavy elements such as gold, platinum, and uranium. Scientists have theorised that such elements could be created by kilonova.
A kilonova is the explosion caused by the fusion of two neutron stars, star remnants densely packed with neutrons.
On Monday, October 16th scientists around the world announced they had witnessed a kilonova for the first time ever. Also witnessed was evidence of heavy elements forming as neutrons were released from the explosion and collided with nearby atoms.
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