A new source of gold has been discovered in the least expected place in the universe – Teach Me About Science

Gold is one of the most coveted metals in the world, but its creation of heavy metals like gold, thorium and uranium requires energetic conditions, such as stellar explosions or a collision between neutron stars. This means that all of the heavy elements on Earth were formed under extreme conditions in astrophysical environments.

Today astrophysicists have an incomplete understanding of how elements heavier than iron are made. Researchers are intrigued by the question in which of these astrophysical events the appropriate conditions exist for the formation of the heavier elements. to surprise, a new study shows that these elements could form in the accretion disks of black holes.

The accretion disk is called the swirling chaos that surrounds an active newborn black hole as it swallows dust and gas from the space around it. In these extreme environments, the high neutrino emission rate should facilitate the conversion of protons into neutrons, which would give rise to an excess of the latter, just what is required 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 elaborate computer simulations, and found that disks are very rich in neutrons as long as certain conditions are met,” Explain Dr. Oliver Just, from the Relativistic Astrophysics group of the GSI Theory research division.

Just dice that: the deciding factor is the total mass of the disk. “The more massive the disk, the more often neutrons are formed from protons by electron capture under neutrino emission, and are available for heavy element synthesis via the r-process.”

On the contrary, if the mass of the disk is very high, the reverse reaction plays a more important role, so that the neutrinos are recaptured to a greater extent by the neutrinos before leaving the disk. These neutrinos convert back to protons, making the fast neutron capture process, or r-process, difficult.

The study indicates that the optimal mass of the 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 these accretion disks occur in collapsing systems, the research is still 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.” said astrophysicist Andreas Bauswein of the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research.

It is known that large amounts of elements are produced inside stars, but when we go to elements heavier than iron, literally catastrophic events are resorted to. One of the most extreme events occurs during the birth of black holes. However, astrophysicists are not sure what the conditions actually hold, apart from the relative contributions of these to the overall abundance of heavy elements in the universe.

The team has been doing a lot of work, using simulations to determine if this is really the case. Rhetorically we can call it the magical moment in which astrophysics and computing come together to trace the history of objects that are common to us today, but as we have seen, its origins go back to cosmic events where it also includes the bizarre holes blacks.

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

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