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Science 27 September 1996:
Vol. 273. no. 5283, pp. 1799 - 0
DOI:

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Research News

Gretchen Vogel

Greenbelt, Maryland--The origin of boron and beryllium is a cosmic enigma, because these atoms are probably too large to have formed in the big bang yet too small and fragile to be forged inside a star. Astrophysicists have long thought that they are produced in interstellar space when light cosmic rays--hydrogen or helium--slam into heavier nuclei like carbon. Now a spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope has traced boron abundance over time and turned this picture on its head: The high-speed cosmic rays, it seems, consist of carbon and similar elements, while their targets are hydrogen or helium in the interstellar gas.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)