In work published in Physical Review Letters, researchers from the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science and two universities in Vietnam—Duy Tan University and University of Khanh Hoa—have made a major breakthrough by proposing, for the first time, a unified and consistent microscopic approach capable of describing simultaneously two important quantities for understanding the statistical properties of nuclei—the nuclear level density and the emission probability of gamma-rays from hot nuclei—which play essential roles in stellar nucleosynthesis.