3 Questions: The origin of the cosmos’ heaviest elements
Reticulum II is an ancient and faint dwarf galaxy discovered in images taken as part of the Dark Energy Survey. It orbits the Milky Way galaxy about 100,000 light years away from us. Though the galaxy looks unassuming at first, the chemical content of its stars may hold the key to unlocking a 60-year-old mystery about the cosmic origin of the heaviest elements in the periodic table. Today in the journal Nature, a team of astronomers at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington report on observations of this unique galaxy using the Magellan telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Lead author and MIT physics graduate student Alex Ji explains more. Q: How are the heaviest elements in the periodic table created in the cosmos? A: Carl Sagan popularized the notion that we are all made of star...