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The eight ways that all the elements in the Universe are made (2021)

The eight ways that all the elements in the Universe are made (2021)

zdw

Comments (40)

  • zokier
    The thing that is unintuitive to me is the timeline and scale. The age of universe is 13.8B years and age of Earth is 4.5B years. And yet Earth has many of these elements in abundance which are produced by complex chains and in trace quantities. Like the elements need first to be produced in stars, then ejected out, then accumulated into protoplanetary dust, then aggregated into planets. It feels wild to me that the process took only twice as long as what Earth has existed.
  • epistasis
    I learned about all these methods (and many other things!) from PBS SpaceTime's YouTube channel.You can buy a "Remember where you came from" periodic table here:https://crowdmade.com/products/pbsspacetime-2030-poster
  • teleforce
    It's a mind boggling that overwhelming majority (more than 98%) of the visible universe's mass are only from the two most lightweight of chemical elements namely Hydrogen and Helium.
  • haunter
    Blood is red due to iron content. Iron can only be produced by nuclear fusion in stars. We are all stardust.
  • rezmason
    This article's from 2021. Does anyone know if there are elements (no pun intended) of this classification of element origins that's impacted by those JWST observations of complex early galaxies?
  • kstrauser
    With as hot and dense as they are, wouldn’t black hole accretion disks and jets form stuff, too?
  • acessoproibido
    The eightfold path, the primordial truth, praise be the ruinous powers!
  • CalChris
    Lithium is early in the periodic table (3) and low in abundance. Now that’s a story. There’s even the missing lithium problem.
  • klodolph
    I think the r process and the s process should be listed separately, rather than lumped together.
  • amriksohata
    White dwarf explosions result in zinc? Can someone ELI5 as to how they know this if a white dwarf has never actually been monitored closely? Or are these just theories? Pluto for example was found to have a haze with newer telescopes so what if the observarions from white dwarfs which are so far away based on assumptions - are not correct?
  • anthk
  • kisama
    The claim that elements beyond 94 are only human-made is speculative and probably false. Transuranic elements up to ~100 are believed to be made in, for example, natural fission reactors and extreme stellar conditions. However, it is accurate to say that none of those exist in bulk. They’re more like astatine and francium: so rare that natural occurrence is on the scale of atoms.
  • anon
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