In astroparticle physics, an Urca process is a reaction which emits a neutrino and which is assumed to take part in cooling processes in neutron stars and white dwarfs. The process was first discussed by George Gamow and Mário Schenberg while they were visiting a casino named Cassino da Urca in Urca, Rio de Janeiro. As Gamow recounts in his autobiography, the name was chosen in part to commemorate the gambling establishment where the two physicists had first met, and "partially because the Urca Process results in a rapid disappearance of thermal energy from the interior of a star, similar to the rapid disappearance of money from the pockets of the gamblers on the Casino de Urca." In Gamow's South Russian dialect, urca (Russian : урка) can also mean a robber or gangster.