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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
A long-held mystery in the field of nuclear physics is why the universe is composed of the specific materials we see around us. In other words, why is it made of "this" stuff and not other stuff?
Specifically of interest are the physical processes responsible for producing heavy elements -- like gold, platinum and uranium -- that are thought to happen during neutron star mergers and explosive stellar events.
Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory led an international nuclear physics experiment conducted at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, that utilizes novel techniques developed at Argonne to study the nature and origin of heavy elements in the universe. The study may provide critical insights into the processes that work together to create the exotic nuclei, and it will inform models of stellar events and the early universe.
[...] The nuclear physicists in the collaboration are the first to observe the neutron-shell structure of a nucleus with fewer protons than lead and more than 126 neutrons -- "magic numbers" in the field of nuclear physics.
At these magic numbers, of which 8, 20, 28, 50 and 126 are canonical values, nuclei have enhanced stability, much as the noble gases do with closed electron shells. Nuclei with neutrons above the magic number of 126 are largely unexplored because they are difficult to produce. Knowledge of their behavior is crucial for understanding the rapid neutron-capture process, or r-process, that produces many of the heavy elements in the universe.
[...] This experiment focused on the mercury isotope 207Hg. The study of 207Hg could shed light on the properties of its close neighbors, nuclei directly involved in key aspects of the r-process.
"One of the biggest questions of this century has been how the elements formed at the beginning of the universe," said Argonne physicist Ben Kay, the lead scientist on the study. "It's difficult to research because we can't just go dig up a supernova out of the earth, so we have to create these extreme environments and study the reactions that occur in them."
[...] The first analyses of the data from the CERN experiment confirm the theoretical predictions of current nuclear models, and the team plans to study other nuclei in the region of 207Hg using these new capabilities, giving deeper insights into the unknown regions of nuclear physics and the r-process.
Journal Reference:
T. L. Tang, B. P. Kay, C. R. Hoffman, et al. First Exploration of Neutron Shell Structure below Lead and beyond N=126. Physical Review Letters, 2020; 124 (6) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.062502
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @08:59AM (1 child)
Dr. Emmett Brown: There's that word again. "Heavy." Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday April 05 2020, @07:10AM
In any case they're not heavy, they're just... big-boned. It's glandular. They're BBElements.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 04 2020, @09:11AM (4 children)
I see, they got back to the old goal of alchemists: Figure out how to make gold.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @10:07AM
And speaking of gold, and Emmet Brown, and Heavy Elements, where are all the damn aristarchus submissions!
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Saturday April 04 2020, @10:08AM (2 children)
Yeah, but most of the Au will decay into Hg or Pt within days. That shiny yellow ass becomes grayish pretty soon :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @07:38PM
"Soon" on what kind of time-scale?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday April 05 2020, @12:32AM
Grayish? Platinum records > gold records! As Gene Simmons once said, "kiss my cash!"
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @11:56AM (3 children)
>> "One of the biggest questions of this century has been how the elements formed at the beginning of the universe,"
Dumb-ass nuclear physicists, the answer is right there in The Bible. You don't even need to read the boring parts in the middle, it's on the very first page.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Saturday April 04 2020, @12:27PM
The correct phraseology is:
"Its God what done it!"
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 4, Touché) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 04 2020, @12:35PM (1 child)
Wrong. Under the assumtion that the text is an accurte description of what happened, you can deduce that God made the elements, but not how he did it.
Well, thinking again, you can't even deduce that God made the elements. The text says that God made the heavens and the earth. But it doesn't state that God made them out of nothing. Thus as far as the text goes, the elements might all have been already there when God decided to make heavens and earth from them.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @04:36PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @12:20PM
Sounds awfully familiar...
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=20/03/10/0422209 [soylentnews.org]
At least it's not the same article but ANL's own blurb, setting it above most dupes from the other site.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Saturday April 04 2020, @08:48PM (3 children)
What other stuff wood the universe be made of? Something not on the periodic table?
This reminds me of a common Sci Fi phrase that automatically breaks my suspension of disbelief. "This alien something or other is made of a metal not found on Earth!" Or like Cap'n America's shield made of "Vibrainium".
What element is that again on the periodic table? What element not found on this earth? Or what is the atomic number of Vibrainium?
One friend suggested to me that things might work differently in another part of the universe. But AFAIK, not in any part that we can observe out to 13.7 billion lite beers.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 05 2020, @02:17AM (1 child)
Could happen, but so far we haven't found anything remotely stable at near Earth conditions. For example, there are electron-positron and muon-antimuon pairs as rudimentary atoms, but they decay quickly. What is interesting is that neutrons are unstable outside of nuclei, they have a half-life of about 15 minutes. But of course, neutrons in a nuclei can be stable for far longer than billions of years. So it is conceivable that some other particles might be relatively stable if merged into a nucleus.
Googling around, I see the peculiar hypernucleus [wikipedia.org] which is almost an atomic nucleus, but contains an additional subatomic hyperon [wikipedia.org] (the Wikipedia article discusses a nucleus with 2 protons, 2 neutrons, and one lambda hyperon.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 05 2020, @02:27AM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @06:16AM
If you could find stable negatively charged muons you could replace electrons with them. Muons are 200 times heavier than electrons. Interatomic bonding distances would be reduced to 1/200th. The resulting metal would be 200^3 times denser and a single atomic layer would be stong enough to stop an artillery shell. It would also have a weight of about 20 tons per square meter, so if you stand it on edge it is going to cut through anything.
What I don't know is what you would get if you replaced only the two electrons in the first s shell of eg, aluminum. All the other shells should tighten up a bit giving you a denser stronger material, but the question is, how much stronger?
So next time you read a SF book with an "unknown metal" assume it is either an unknown alloy, of which there are still many, or someone has messed with the electrons, depending on what properties it has.