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An underground route to grasping the Milky Way’s oldest stars

Nuclear-fusion experiments performed deep under Earth’s surface reveal one possible scenario that could have resulted in the chemical abundances found in an ancient star in the Milky Way.
  1. Marco Pignatari

    1. Marco Pignatari is at the Konkoly Observatory, Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences, H-1121 Budapest, Hungary, and in the E.A. Milne Centre for Astrophysics, University of Hull, Hull, UK.

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  2. Athanasios Psaltis

    1. Athanasios Psaltis is at the Institute for Nuclear Physics, Theory Center, Technical University of Darmstadt, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany.

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When the first stars in the Milky Way formed around 13 billion years ago, they consisted mainly of hydrogen and helium. But other chemical elements — the heaviest being calcium — have been detected in the atmosphere of one of the oldest-known stars, an amazing object known as SMSS0313-6708 that lies just 1,800 parsecs from Earth1. Astronomers and astrophysicists were puzzled, and started to look for ways in which calcium and the other elements could have been made. The solution, it seems, might be found under Earth’s surface. In a paper in Nature, Zhang et al.2 report nuclear-physics experiments that could support one explanation for the chemical abundances found in SMSS0313-6708 — with implications for our understanding of other stars in the Universe.

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Nature 610, 640-641 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03367-3

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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