Born to do Math 52 – Metaprimes (Part 18)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/28
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Rick Rosner: Stars, it is easy to fuse raw protons, which are Hydrogen nuclei, together. The easiest thing to do in a star is to fuse Hydrogen into Deuterium, Tritium, and then Helium. Mostly. That takes the least amount of pressure. It takes more pressure to turn Helium into stuff. As stars cook down, they do a lot of stuff. They cool down, expand, and sometimes blow off the outer shell. Depending on how much the various elements are in the star depending on the size of the star, some stars can hang up to the point where they are almost entirely Oxygen and Carbon.
That’s a smaller star. A bigger star, the one the size of our Sun can keep cooking until it is almost entirely Iron. But at some point, there’s no more energy to be gained from being further cooked down and smushed down. Most stars stop, but some bigger stars can keep going to become neutron stars, and can be mushed down – probably not the right thing to say – and they are kind of one big nucleus.
Other stars can keep going from that point until they are a blackish hole. Iron is the last element that you can produce as a huge percentage of the mass of a star. The elements beyond Iron are kind of produced in like artisanal batches by supernova explosives, where the pressure wave pushes through heavy nuclei and smushes them further together, but the curve of binding energy. It is the curve of how much energy it takes per nucleon – per proton and neutron—
It is the binding energy there is released for each nucleon in that nucleus. It reaches a peak at Iron. To get any heavier elements, you will not be creating energy. There will not be any large scale burning. That’s how heavier elements are formed, in the interior of stars as they boil themselves down and then explode.
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