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Helium-4 makes up about one quarter of the ordinary matter in the universe by mass, with almost all of the rest being hydrogen. While nuclear fusion in stars also produces helium-4, most of the helium-4 in the Sun and in the universe is thought to have been produced during the Big Bang, known as "primordial helium". However, primordial helium-4 ...
The theory of BBN gives a detailed mathematical description of the production of the light "elements" deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7. Specifically, the theory yields precise quantitative predictions for the mixture of these elements, that is, the primordial abundances at the end of the big-bang.
It has a charge of +2 e and a mass of 4 Da. For example, uranium-238 decays to form thorium-234. While alpha particles have a charge +2 e, this is not usually shown because a nuclear equation describes a nuclear reaction without considering the electrons – a convention that does not imply that the nuclei necessarily occur in neutral atoms.
Helium-4 is produced by alpha-decay, and the helium trapped in Earth's crust is also mostly non-primordial. In other types of radioactive decay, such as cluster decay , larger species of nuclei are ejected (for example, neon-20), and these eventually become newly formed stable atoms.
Illustration of a proton–proton chain, from hydrogen forming deuterium, helium-3, and regular helium-4. Nuclear transmutation is the conversion of one chemical element or an isotope into another chemical element. [1] Nuclear transmutation occurs in any process where the number of protons or neutrons in the nucleus of an atom is changed.
Supernova nucleosynthesis is the nucleosynthesis of chemical elements in supernova explosions.. In sufficiently massive stars, the nucleosynthesis by fusion of lighter elements into heavier ones occurs during sequential hydrostatic burning processes called helium burning, carbon burning, oxygen burning, and silicon burning, in which the byproducts of one nuclear fuel become, after ...
In nuclear physics, properties of a nucleus depend on evenness or oddness of its atomic number (proton number) Z, neutron number N and, consequently, of their sum, the mass number A. Most importantly, oddness of both Z and N tends to lower the nuclear binding energy, making odd nuclei generally less stable.
As a side effect of the process, some carbon nuclei fuse with additional helium to produce a stable isotope of oxygen and energy: 12 6 C + 4 2 He → 16 8 O + γ (+7.162 MeV) Nuclear fusion reactions of helium with hydrogen produces lithium-5, which also is highly unstable, and decays back into smaller nuclei with a half-life of 3.7 × 10 −22 s.