Speaker
Jeremy Heyl
(University of British Columbia)
Description
I will outline how nearly all of the elements essential to you are produced in the evolution of low-mass and high-mass stars and in white-dwarf binaries. All the essential elements except for iodine, that is. The story of where did iodine come from along more common materials like platinum (yes, platinum is more common in the Universe) was a mystery for 60 years between when B2FH first posed the question and the discovery of the production of lanthanides in the merging of neutron stars in 2017. What are neutron stars, why did astronomers argue that they could be the source for the r-process elements, and what may we learn in the future?
