When stars die, they spread the elements they’ve created in their cores out to space. But other objects and processes in space also create elements. Eventually, that “star stuff” scatters across the ...

The MEGATRON project spent 40 million processor hours on the United Kingdom’s national supercomputers, a budget the ...

Isn’t it amazing that the heavy elements we see here on Earth were created by stars going supernova? The short answer to your question is that different kinds of supernovae are caused by different ...

In a study published in The Astrophysical Journal, scientists have proposed the features of the rapid neutron capture process (r-process) nucleosynthesis in a novel scenario: common envelop jet ...

Stars once thought to provide evidence of hypernovae may instead owe their unusual chemistry to ordinary supernovae that ...

Despite its intensity, the gravitational collapse of certain massive stars does not produce an abundance of heavy elements. A collapsar’s progenitor is massive enough that it forms a black hole. To ...

Evidence for hypernovae, theorized to be the most powerful explosions in the universe, has been disputed in two papers by ...

When neutron stars merge, they create a powerful explosion called a kilonova that flings out neutron-rich material, some of which decays into heavy elements through a process called the r-process.

Stars often end their lives with a dazzling explosion, creating and releasing material into the universe. This will then seed new life, leading to a cosmic cycle of birth, death and rebirth.