Physicists start to pin down how stars forge heavy atoms

“It’s like if you had a porcelain plate with a picture of an Italian city,” said Hendrik Schatz (opens a new tab), a nuclear astrophysicist at FRIB. If you wanted a piece with just one house on it, you’d have to break a lot of plates before you got the right picture. “We’re shattering a trillion plates per second.”

Its isotopes are even tricker to isolate; if fragmentation during the i-process is like capturing a picture of a house from a shattered plate, then the r-process means picking out only the window.

I'm thinking if it is a right analogy? Wouldn't it be easier to get a specific smaller piece? I mean there are more details on a bigger piece that should be preserved all, while a smaller piece will have fewer details, so the probability of this should be higher, shouldn't it?