How stars make carbon described

RALEIGH, N.C., May 11 (UPI) -- A U.S. researcher has helped create a supercomputer simulation that demonstrates how carbon, the basis of all life forms, is produced inside stars.

Astronomer Fred Hoyle said more than 50 years ago when three helium nuclei come together inside the core of a star, they have difficulty combining to form carbon-12, the stuff we're made of. He predicted a new state of carbon-12, with energy tuned just right to make the formation of carbon possible in stars, a state now known as the Hoyle state.

While later experimentation suggested the theory was correct, no one had ever been able to reproduce the Hoyle state from scratch, starting from the known interactions of protons and neutrons, so Hoyle's theory remained unproven.

North Carolina State University physicist Dean Lee, with German colleagues, had previously developed a method for describing all the possible ways that protons and neutrons can bind with one another inside nuclei, an N.C. State release said Wednesday.

When the researchers put six protons and six neutrons in their "effective field theory" simulation, the Hoyle state appeared together with other observed states of carbon-12, proving the theory correct.

"Our method places the particles into a simulation with certain space and time parameters, then allows them to do what they want to do," Lee said. "Within those simulations, the Hoyle state shows up."