The history of astronomy and cosmology is full of stories showing how breakthroughs often occur one laboratory experiment at a time. During the last century, laboratory researchers explored how elements emit light at specific colors when heated to different temperatures. This has allowed generations of researchers, including me, to tease out what elements compose the stars and estimate just how hot various objects may be.

From experimenting with the interactions between light and atoms, researchers have moved on to exploring the relationships between energy and particles. This is accomplished in massive research facilities that can accelerate atoms to high velocities and crash them together to produce new and often unstable particles and atoms. Using Michigan State University’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, researchers have studied how a beam of a specific chlorine atom – chlorine-31 – could stream into a detector and decay into sulfur-31 with the flip of a proton into a neutron. This sulfur would then, sometimes, release a proton and evolve one more time into phosphorus-30. This work appears in Physical Review Letters and was led by T. Budner.

This process, which reduces atoms from the 17-proton chlorine atom to the 15-proton phosphorus, is the inverse of a process that occurs in exploding stars and builds atoms with progressively more protons in their core, and this experiment was the first time we’ve been able to directly measure the rate that this kind of a reaction can occur at. This experiment provides new information on how fast or slow reactions can occur and informs how many different kinds of atoms have a chance to form during supernovae. With this new data plugged into supernovae models, they find that the explosion of white dwarf stars rich in oxygen-neon can “produce excesses of the isotope silicon-30.” This stable atom is found in grains of stardust and is a building block of everything from meteorites to Earth itself.

And now we know because atoms were slammed around in a lab on Earth. Science is weird, and science is awesome.

More Information

U.S. Department of Energy press release

“Constraining the 30P(p, γ)31S Reaction Rate in ONe Novae via the Weak, Low-Energy, β-Delayed Proton Decay of 31Cl,” T. Budner et al., 2022 May 3, Physical Review Letters