Neutral particles lurking in atomic nuclei, neutrons are responsible for nuclear reactions and for creating precious elements.
can keep going and create shells of increasingly heavier elements all the way down to iron-56 in the star's core. At this point, the reactions require more energy to be put into them to fuse elements heavier than iron than what is actually produced by those reactions, so those reactions cease, energy production grinds to a halt and the core of the star collapses, instigating a.
In the supernova blast, atomic nuclei are then able to sweep up all these free neutrons before they all decay , to instigate r-process nucleosynthesis. Once the nuclei are full of neutrons they turn unstable and undergo beta decay, transforming those extra neutrons into protons. The addition of these protons changes the type of element that a nucleus is, hence it's a way of
such as gold, platinum and other precious metals. The gold in your jewelry was made billions of years ago by rapid neutron capture in a supernova!As we have seen, only in the most extreme conditions can neutrons survive outside of atomic nuclei, and there are very few places in the universe more extreme thanNeutron stars are what is left of the core of a star after it has undergone core collapse and exploded as a supernova.
With no nuclear reactions to generate energy to counteract gravity, the mass of the core is so great that it undergoes a catastrophic gravitational collapse in which the gravitational pressure is great enough that protons and electrons are able to overcome the electrostatic force between them and smush together, merging to form neutrons in a kind of reverse beta decay. Almost all the atoms in the core turn into neutrons, hence why we call the result a neutron star.
Binary neutron star mergers, which are detectable as kilonovae and via their gravitational waves, are also sites of copious r-process nucleosynthesis. The
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