An international research team recently theorized, using the world's most powerful supercomputer and new artificial intelligence techniques, how the extreme conditions in stars yield Carbon-12, which they have described as a crucial gateway to life's birth.
As specified in a EurekAlert! report, the team's fundamental question, "How does the cosmos construct carbon-12?" James Vary, a physics and astronomy professor at Iowa State University, and a long-time research collaboration member. He added it turns out, that it is not easy to generate carbon-12.
It takes the extreme pressures and heat inside stars, or in stellar explosions and collisions to create emergent, unstable, excited-state nuclei with three loosely connected clumps, each with a pair of protons and a pair of neutrons.
A portion of those unstable carbon nuclei can shoot off a small amount of extra energy in the form of gamma rays and turn stable carbon-12, also known as "the stuff of life."
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Such elements as carbon, oxygen, and others are produced by nucleosynthesis and are ejected into the interstellar medium via mass loss by stars, including supernova explosions.
Life's Birth
The research published in the Nature Communications journal details the supercomputer simulations of the researchers, as well as the resulting theory for the nuclear structure of carbon that's favoring its formation in the cosmos.
The paper's corresponding author is Takaharu Otsuka of the University of Tokyo, the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accwntor-based Science, and the Advanced Science Research Center of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency.
Specifically, this study describes the manner alpha particles, helium-4, with two protons and two neutrons, can cluster to form much heavier atoms, which include an unstable, excited-12 state called the Hoyle state, predicted in 1953 by Fred Hoyle, a theoretical astrophysicist, to life as it is known.
The study investigators wrote that this alpha-practice clustering is a very "beautiful and fascinating" notion, and is certainly plausible as the alpha practice is specifically stable with large binding energy.
World's Most Powerful Supercomputer Used
To test the notion, the study authors ran supercomputer simulations which include computations on the Fugaku supercomputer at the RIKEN centers for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan.
An Iowa State University report specified that Fugaku is listed as the world's most powerful supercomputer, not to mention, is thrice more powerful than No. 2, based on the most recent TOP500 supercomputer rankings.
Vary explained, that the team also did their "work ab initio," or from first principles which means that their calculations were based on known science and did not include additional parameters or assumptions.
The team developed a method as well, in statistical learning, a branch of computational AI, to show alpha clustering, the Hoyle state, and the stable carbon-12's eventual clustering.
Carbon Production
The professor also said the team has worked for more than 10 years to develop its software, fine-tune its computer codes, run its calculations and work out lighter problems while constructing the current work.
He elaborated, "there's a lot of subtlety," a lot of stunning interactions happening in there. All computations, physical quantities, as well as theoretical subtlety are matching what experimental data there is in this corner of nuclear physics, said the research team.
Therefore, the researchers think they have some basic answers about the origins of carbon-12. According to Vary, that should result in more research looking for "fine-grain detail" about the process and how it is working.
Referring to the current work Vary asked if the carbon production, for instance, was mostly the outcome of internal processes in stars, or, if it was supernova star explosions. The astronomy professor also wondered if it was collisions of super-dense neutron stars.
Despite the questions, one thing is clear to the team though. This so-called "nucleosynthesis in extreme environments generates a lot of stuff, including carbon.
Related information about nucleosynthesis is shown on London Jenks' YouTube video below:
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