Like all stars, our sun is powered by the fusion of hydrogen into heavy elements. Nuclear fusion is not only what makes stars shine, it is also the primary source of the chemical elements that make up the world around us. Much of our understanding of stellar fusion comes from …
Read More »
The Periodic Table of Elements, created primarily by the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev (1834-1907), celebrated its 150th anniversary last year. Its importance as an organization theory of chemistry will be difficult to understand – all emerging chemists are familiar with it from an early stage of their education. Given the …
Read More »
An international team of scientists has helped unravel the long-standing mystery of how deposits are rarer than Earth’s – and sometimes disappear without being discovered. Rare Earth Elements (REE) is a set of 17 precious chemical elements that are vitally important in the manufacture of technological devices, from smartphones to …
Read More »
Astronomers have discovered a mysterious stream of ancient stars on the distant edges of the galaxy – a strange star race so unlike any we’ve seen before, they may well be the last of their kind. This unusual collection of stars, called the ‘Phoenix current’, after the constellation Phoenix in …
Read More »
A star discovered at full speed by the Milky Way is so strange that astronomers can only conclude that it was ejected during a very unusual supernova event. The star, a white dwarf about 1,430 light-years away called SDSS J1240 + 6710, and nicknamed Dox, advances at 250 kilometers per …
Read More »