Heavy Elements Quotes

The universe starts off with the Big Bang theory, and the first thing that emerged from the Big Bang is essentially hydrogen and then helium. And that's what combusts in stars. Finally, stars implode, and they build heavier elements out of that. And those heavier elements are reconstituted in the heart of other stars, eventually.

You could think of the galaxy as a sort of stove with lots of pots on it, and the pots are the interstellar medium, like a chicken broth getting stronger with every reduction. Every time a supernova goes off and sends its heavy elements out into the interstellar medium, we cook up a stew that's better and better for solar systems and life.

Big Bang gave us hydrogen and helium. We couldn't make people out of hydrogen and helium. So we're made out of exploding stars.

Most stars just fuse hydrogen into helium, but larger stars can fuse helium into other elements. Still larger stars, in turn, fuse those elements into slightly bigger ones, and so on.

55 Cancri is extraordinarily rich in heavy elements and extraordinarily efficient at making planets - much more so than our sun - and those elements are the very ones you need to make planets that aren't just gas giants.

When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion.

When black holes collide, the only thing we can detect is gravitational waves, everything else is swallowed inside. But neutron stars are relatively lighter than black holes, so when they collide and merge, a small part of their mass and radiation does escape and can be detected along with gravitational waves. [We can see that] every atom of iodine on Earth, including the iodine you put on your wound, had arrived here in the distant past from a merger of neutron stars,

The central region of the Milky Way, known as the bulge, is stuffed with literally tens of billions of stars. And most of these are old - considerably older than our Sun or its neighbors - because this part of the galaxy formed first. Consequently, bulge stars are generally deficient in heavy elements.

Clearly, enriching the cosmos with heavy elements takes a while. So there's inevitably an interval between the sterile aftermath of the Big Bang and a time when the cosmic chemistry set had enough ingredients to make rocky planets (and squishy biology).

If some nuclear properties of the heavy elements had been a little different from what they turned out to be, it might have been impossible to build a bomb.