From Nuclei to the Cosmos: Tracing Heavy-Element Production with the Oldest Stars

Understand

Understanding the origin of the elements has been a decades long pursuit, with many open questions still remaining.

• Old stars found in the Milky Way and its dwarf satellite galaxies can provide answers because they preserve clean elemental patterns of the nucleosynthesis processes that operated some 13 billion years ago.
• This enables the reconstruction of the chemical evolution of the elements.
• Here we focus on the astrophysical signatures of heavy neutron-capture elements made in the s-, i- and r-process found in old stars.