?Where do chemical elements come from
Have you ever wondered where the chemical elements that make up this world come from, such as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, iron, etc., and even the elements that make up your body and every living being!
?Where did these elements come from and how did they get to where they are today
The short answer to the question of where the elements that make up everything come from, even the planets, moons, and single-celled organisms, were formed a long time ago in the interior of the stars.. In Carl Sagen’s book “The Universe” he says:
(To make apple pie, you need flour, apples, something like that, and the heat of the oven. Materials are made of molecules, like sugar and water, for example. Molecules, in turn, are made of atoms, such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and a few other elements. Where do these atoms come from? They are made They are all in the stars. A star is a kind of cosmic kitchen in which atoms are cooked, forming heavier atoms. Helium comes from the fusion of hydrogen, carbon from the fusion of helium, oxygen from carbon, etc.)
If these elements are formed inside stars, then... how did they get to a planet like Earth?! The idea is that after stars are born, they live by merging atoms to provide themselves with energy.
But this energy is not infinite. At some point, the star runs out of nuclear fuel and turns into the red giant phase. In the last moments before the star explodes in the form of a supernova, the outer surface of the star pushes against the core of the star... like a ball that suddenly became smaller and shrank...
Consider with me the following idea until you come closer to understanding the last moment in the lives of stars. Suppose there are TNT explosives on the floor of a room. Suddenly the roof of the room falls on the explosives. The ceiling falling on the explosives will cause them to explode, and soon the ceiling will bounce back in the opposite direction, in a fall. The roof was the action, and its rebound due to the explosion was the reaction.
Did you think about the idea?! The outer surface of the star is pressing on the core of the star. The pressure here is so intense that one cubic centimeter has a density of one billion tons. When the surface is compressed on the star, it bounces back in the opposite direction. This is not the explosion of the Hiroshima bomb or a giant hydrogen bomb!
This is a star explosion. A supernova can strip any planet of its atmosphere if it is close to it within 100 light-years. A supernova is brighter than an entire galaxy, and the galaxy contains billions of stars. Consider the idea of the death of a star that emits more light than the light it emits. Of an entire galaxy for several days, and that's enough to show you how powerful a supernova is.
But what is the secret to the power of recoil?! The reason lies in the weak nuclear force. When the star shrinks and the surface pushes against the nucleus, at that moment when the protons and electrons inside the star are violently compressed... Here the nuclear force begins to transform the protons into neutrons... and the neutrons push the surface of the star outward in a catastrophic explosion, similar to the matter. It is as if something is pressing on you, but you decide to resist and push this thing away from you. At a certain moment, the neutrons are able to create a reverse pressure that pushes the surface of the star outward, causing a supernova.
At that moment, the temperature is in the hundreds of millions and billions, and because of the high temperature, new elements are formed into existence that did not exist before, such as gold and even uranium and platinum... and because of the explosion of the star, all of these elements are scattered in space... and with time, when this stellar dust cools New star systems, planets and moons carrying the same elements are formed from it. Therefore, the gold that we have, whether in our bodies or in our jewelry, came from the death of the stars. As Carl Sagen puts it, “We are made of star dust.”
In the picture here is the giant star-making machine, the Orion Nebula, which extends more than 24 light-years in length. You can consider that one light-year is equal to 9.5 trillion km!
Source: websites