Study Sheds Light on Stellar Origin of 60Fe miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Chinese Academy of Sciences
It is always exciting to find new isotopes with extreme neutron/proton numbers in nuclear physics research. In the region of heavy nuclei, α-decay is one of the pervasive decay modes and plays an essential role in searching for new isotopes. However, even after about a century of studying α-decay, scientists still cannot perfectly describe how the α-particle is formed at the surface of the nucleus before its emission.
In the α-decay process, the α-particle can be regarded not only as two protons plus two neutrons, but also as two proton-neutron pairs. Although previous studies have proved the importance of the pairing forces between the identical nucleons, it remains unclear whether the strong proton-neutron interactions have an impact on α-decay properties, especially in the heavy nuclear region.
IMAGE:
60Fe yield in 18 solar mass star. Blue lines (LMP) are calculations based on previous decay rate, red lines (present work) are those based on the new measurement.. view more
Credit: Physical Review Letters
Researchers from the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators have recently made great progress in the study of the stellar beta-decay rate of
59Fe, which constitutes an important step towards understanding
60Fe nucleosynthesis in massive stars. The results were published in
Physical Review Letters on April 12.
Radioactive nuclide
60Fe plays an essential role in nuclear astrophysical studies. It is synthesized in massive stars by successive neutron captures on a stable nucleus of