The journey of the elements starts in the earliest moments of the Big Bang, when our universe was only a few seconds to a few minutes old. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

Physicists in Japan have blasted out the heaviest calcium nuclei ever seen—each containing the 20 protons needed to make the element, but with a huge number—40—of neutrons. That's twice as many ...

Heavy duty A high-energy photonic jet (white and blue) blasts through a collapsing star with a black hole at its centre. The cocoon where free neutrons may be available for the r-process is shown in ...

Physicists are drawing closer to answering a long-standing mystery of the universe: how long a neutron lives. Neutrons are electrically neutral particles that usually combine with protons to make up ...

There are scientific explanations for this, including theories about layers of particles in the nucleus, and “magic numbers” of protons and neutrons that may be stable in combination. If we can find ...

When radiochemist Jennifer Shusterman and her colleagues got the first results of their experiment, no one expected what they saw: Atoms of a weird version of the element zirconium had ...