Research

Accretion Regimes of Neutrino-Cooled Flows onto Black Holes (Javiera Hernández-Morales and Daniel M. Siegel 2026, The Astrophysical Journal 996 142)

In this work, we studied the role of accretion disks around black holes as the places of origin of the heaviest elements in the universe, such as gold and platinum. These heavy nuclei are formed through a rapid neutron-capture process, also known as the r-process, where light elements coming from stellar evolution are able to capture a large number of neutrons in a very short time, typically one second. We presented a simplified model of an accretion disk, including general-relativistic effects, and demonstrated that disks around black holes as heavy as 3000 times the mass of the Sun can be sites of successfull r-process nucleosynthesis.