“It’s like if you had a porcelain plate with a picture of an Italian city,” said Hendrik Schatz (opens a new tab), a nuclear astrophysicist at FRIB. If you wanted a piece with just one house on it, you’d have to break a lot of plates before you got the right picture. “We’re shattering a trillion plates per second.”
Its isotopes are even tricker to isolate; if fragmentation during the i-process is like capturing a picture of a house from a shattered plate, then the r-process means picking out only the window.
I'm thinking if it is a right analogy? Wouldn't it be easier to get a specific smaller piece? I mean there are more details on a bigger piece that should be preserved all, while a smaller piece will have fewer details, so the probability of this should be higher, shouldn't it?
frontfor•4h ago
I think the analogy here is that it’s indeed easier to get any smaller piece, but it’s harder to get a specific smaller piece you want.
dumpsterdiver•1h ago
Without reading the article I visualized the analogies mentioned in these comments as a house that you still have the potential to get several windows out of reliably, and importantly - you wouldn’t be missing a corner from an otherwise perfect window.
The house soaks up environmental damage to keep identifiable windows intact, vs a pile of mostly broken / not-up-to-spec windows.
ordu•5h ago
“It’s like if you had a porcelain plate with a picture of an Italian city,” said Hendrik Schatz (opens a new tab), a nuclear astrophysicist at FRIB. If you wanted a piece with just one house on it, you’d have to break a lot of plates before you got the right picture. “We’re shattering a trillion plates per second.”
Its isotopes are even tricker to isolate; if fragmentation during the i-process is like capturing a picture of a house from a shattered plate, then the r-process means picking out only the window.
I'm thinking if it is a right analogy? Wouldn't it be easier to get a specific smaller piece? I mean there are more details on a bigger piece that should be preserved all, while a smaller piece will have fewer details, so the probability of this should be higher, shouldn't it?
frontfor•4h ago
dumpsterdiver•1h ago
The house soaks up environmental damage to keep identifiable windows intact, vs a pile of mostly broken / not-up-to-spec windows.