How a planet comes together has implications for whether it captures and retains the volatile elements, including nitrogen, carbon and water, that eventually give rise to life, according to scientists ...

Elements heavier than iron, such as gold and uranium, are primarily formed through neutron capture processes, specifically the rapid neutron capture process (r-process). The r-process, unlike the ...

Most of the carbon and nitrogen in our bodies probably came from a planet the size of Mars crashing into Earth 4.4 billion years ago, scientists say. Researchers have long thought that these elements, ...

Astrophysicists are one step closer to understanding how the heaviest chemical elements are created in the universe, thanks to a camera designed and built at the University of Sheffield. Scientists ...

One of the great ongoing challenges of astrophysics, to find out how stars evolve and die, is to be tackled in an ambitious European research programme. This will involve studying in the laboratory ...

Around 3.5 billion years ago, life began to sprout on a fairly quiet, desolate planet we call Earth. Tracing the origins of life, and how molecules combined to create microbial life, is perhaps the ...

Before the planets in our solar system formed or the Sun turned on and started shining, two other stars had to die. Their deaths and later collision would seed the area where our area with many of the ...

Heavy elements are produced during stellar explosion or on the surfaces of neutron stars through the capture of hydrogen nuclei (protons). This occurs at extremely high temperatures, but at relatively ...

The word magic is not often used in the context of science. But in the early 1930s, scientists discovered that some atomic nuclei—the center part of atoms, which make up all matter—were more stable ...

An international team of scientists using one of the pair of 10-meter telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii has shown that the early moments of our ...

Even if early Earth had water and oxygen, the planet would still have needed another ingredient for life to flourish: heavy metals. Our cellphones, Earth’s core and even human metabolism would ...