Physicists one step closer to unraveling what's inside stars

A new study has provided a deeper insight into what's inside the stars.

UK nuclear physicists are one step closer to being able to read the inside of stars and discover new elements that exist for only a trillionth of a trillionth of a second inside exploding supernovae.

Part of an international project, R3B, they have taken the latest step towards the development of a detector that will reveal missing information about extreme states of matter, with the successful commissioning of one its first silicon detector modules.

R3B had been developing a ground breaking detector system that would provide key technology for NuSTAR (Nuclear Structure, Astrophysics and Reactions), one of the four main international experiments planned for FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) in Germany which, when completed, would be the most advanced nuclear physics research facility in the world.

At FAIR, NuSTAR will create extraordinarily rare nuclear species that only exist momentarily within exploding stars such as supernovae. R3B will be made up of a series of highly complex sub-detectors and, for its part, the UK team has developed a state-of-the-art silicon tracker that would be capable of exploiting these high intensity beams at NuSTAR, allowing researchers to study the properties of these rare nuclear species that do not occur naturally on earth.