Rare earth elements There Belongs Another Planet

Researchers have detected a rare element called tellurium belong to the Earth, the three ancient stars. The discovery was achieved using a spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope.

Spectrograph is an instrument to sort out the star's light into a spectrum of wavelengths. If an element is present in the star, the atoms of these elements absorb light at specific wavelengths star. Researchers can observe a decrease in absorption as the spectrograph data.

The researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Ohio State University, explained that the trace tellurium (very rarely found on Earth) is the star of approximately 12 billion years old and is located a few thousand light years from Earth.

Tellurium is detected after the reduction was found in the ultraviolet spectrum, and are at wavelengths that match the tellurium was absorption of natural light. Thus was launched InternationalBusinessTimes, Thursday (23/02/2012).

Incidentally, the researchers also found that the ratio of heavy elements (such as barium and strontium) are the three stars are similar to each other. According to them, tellurium are elements that are difficult to detect because it absorbs light in the ultraviolet spectrum, so it may be seen through telescopes on the ground.

However, this finding supports the theory that the elements are derived from a very rare type of supernova, during the rapid process of nuclear fusion.

"You can make iron and nickel in a normal supernova, anywhere in the universe. But the heavy elements in supernova seems to only be special. Adding more elements to the pattern observed elements will help us understand the astrophysical and environmental conditions required for this process, "said Anna Frebel, Assistant Professor of astrophysics at MIT.

"On Earth, all made of carbon and other elements, and we want to understand how the emergence of tellurium on Earth," he concluded