CHEERS Science
Where do chemical elements come from?
Very soon after the 'Big Bang', when the Universe came into existence, the hot plasma of elementary particles in the young universe cooled down and hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium and beryllium were created. Only about 500 million years later, the first stars formed. In the cores of these stars, hydrogen and helium were for the first time fused into much heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and iron. When these stars exploded at the end of their lifetime, they enriched their pristine surroundings with heavy metals and changed the Universe forever.
The heavy elements made it easier for the gas in the Universe to cool and form stars, which lead to a strong star burst when the Universe was about 2-3 billion years old. At the end of their lives, many of these stars exploded as supernovae. Since these explosions are driven by nuclear fusion, supernovae create and eject heavy elements in their surroundings. The star burst that occured 10-11 billion years ago is thought to have produced most of the chemical elements in the Universe.
A review about the science behind the CHEERS project can be found here (PDF).
Collaboration
- Jelle de Plaa (PI), Jelle Kaastra, Francois Mernier, Junjie Mao
SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, The Netherlands
Leiden University, The Netherlands - Ciro Pinto, Andy Fabian
Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK - Norbert Werner
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic - Thomas Reiprich, Yu-Ying Zhang
Argelander-institut für Astronomie, Bonn, Germany - Lorenzo Lovisari, Gerrit Schellenberger
Harvard Smithsonian CfA, USA
Argelander-institut für Astronomie, Bonn, Germany - Jeremy Sanders, Hans Böhringer, Florian Hofmann
MPE, Germany - Alexis Finoguenov, Jussi Ahoranta
University of Helsinki, Finland - Onno Pols
Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands - Aurora Simionescu
ISAS, JAXA, Japan - Jacco Vink
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
