a texas a&m university-led collaboration has yielded new insight into one of the universes most important primordial reactions that made all life on earth possible the multi-institution team of nuclear scientists that also includes researchers from washington university in st louis and ohio university concluded in a recent study that the role neutrons play in the creation of carbon considered the definitive building block of life actually is much smaller than previously thought their data acquired during 2020 and analyzed within the past year is detailed in a paper published wednesday (apr 20) in nature communications these findings are extremely significant because it demonstrates that the rate at which stars burn helium together to form carbon is less sensitive to any neutrons in the stars which were previously thought to speed up this process said dr jack bishop an assistant research scientist at the texas a&m cyclotron institute and a lead author of the paper understanding the way that stars burn is extremely important in understanding the life and death of stars as well as where the elements that make up our universe originate from and in what quantity the experiment specifically focused on the formation of carbon-12 which is produced inside the cores of dying stars in a rare phenomenon called the triple-alpha process where three alpha particles (helium-4 nuclei) collide and fuse while scientists have long known the highly excited state of carbon produced as a result of this process emits gamma rays to achieve a stable condition (regular carbon-12) they have suspected that other particles also play a role in that de-excitation specifically neutrons which carry no electrical charge and can remove extra energy because the reaction requires four particles a neutron and three alpha particles to occur within an extremely small volume of space comparable to the size of an atomic nucleus and a tiny time interval equal to a 10th of a femtosecond directly measuring this process as it occurs in stars is essentially impossible the team instead measured the probability of its inverse breaking apart the carbon-12 with neutrons in a time-reversed reaction that effectively reverts the carbon-12 back to its three alpha particles until recently the probability for this process was estimated only theoretically says texas a&m physicist dr grigory rogachev an expert in low-energy experimental nuclear physics and a principal investigator for the project we now have the direct measurement which provides accurate data on the probability of this process said rogachev head of the texas a&m department of physics and astronomy and a cyclotron institute member it turned out that the theoretical predictions for the probability of this neutron upscattering on carbon were off by more than one order of magnitude the experimentally measured value is much smaller to prove this the team utilized a testing apparatus called the texas active target or texat a specialized particle detector known as an active-target time-projection chamber that recently was constructed at the cyclotron institute by firing beams of high-energy neutrons into the detector they were able to blast apart carbon nuclei in carbon dioxide gas and observe the breakup pattern for a variety of different energies in three-dimensional renderings the propensity of carbon-12 to break apart into three alpha particles indeed was seen to be lower and therefore much less important than expected based on the previous theoretical models learn how the texat detector works and the science behind the collaborations hypothesis in this 2020 video on the texas a&m science youtube channel: