Astronomers Couldn't Explain This Ancient Star's Chemistry. A Lab Experiment Just Did.

Everything from the gold in your smart phone to the calcium in your bones was originally created in a star. But for a long time there has been a question about the levels of one particular element - strontium, which makes fireworks burn bright red and is used in glow-in-the-dark paint. A new paper published in Nature Communications Physics from a large group of researchers led by Caley M. Harris, a graduate student at Michigan State University, thinks they have found an answer for why that particular elemental level was skewed - and doing so required some very elaborate laboratory testing.