Viewpoint: Reaching the Limits of Nuclear Existence
Researchers have identified the largest possible isotopes of fluorine and neon, extending the neutron “dripline” for the first time in 20...
Hunting for rare isotopes: The mysterious radioactive atomic nuclei that will be in tomorrow’s techn
Article published in The Conversation US
Women who made Nuclear Astrophysics
Nuclear astrophysics is a diverse and complex field that deals with diverse and complex questions. We are trying to understand how stars...
New Research: Photon emission of exotic nuclei in stars
Atomic nuclei are complex little beasts. If, however, you are curious enough to look closely, you’ll see that these tiny constituents of...
How Quantum Mechanics Saved Our Lives
I’ll try to make an analogy of quantum mechanics with mountain hiking, so bare with me for a second. It takes a lot of effort (a lot of...
Elements from the stars: The unexpected discovery that upended astrophysics 66 years ago
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
Isotopes in the cosmos
I mentioned the basics of isotopes and why they are useful in our lives in a previous post. Here I wanted to talk about why isotopes...
Why are we here? Or "An impossible nuclear reaction!"
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What makes a supernova go boom?
To be fair, many of my colleagues are working day and night trying to figure out exactly how supernovae explode, so I won’t claim it’s a...
Why is there so much Iron in the Universe?
I get asked this question a lot: Why is there so much iron in the Universe? If you look at the big picture, our Universe, our Solar...