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The abundance of the chemical elements is a measure of the occurrences of the chemical elements relative to all other elements in a given environment. Abundance is measured in one of three ways: by mass fraction (in commercial contexts often called weight fraction), by mole fraction (fraction of atoms by numerical count, or sometimes fraction of molecules in gases), or by volume fraction.
The heaviest element known at the end of the 19th century was uranium, with an atomic mass of about 240 (now known to be 238) amu. Accordingly, it was placed in the last row of the periodic table; this fueled speculation about the possible existence of elements heavier than uranium and why A = 240 seemed to be the limit
This final burning in massive stars, called explosive nucleosynthesis or supernova nucleosynthesis, is the final epoch of stellar nucleosynthesis. A stimulus to the development of the theory of nucleosynthesis was the discovery of variations in the abundances of elements found in the universe. The need for a physical description was already ...
[15] [16] The name honors the nuclear physicist Yuri Oganessian, who played a leading role in the discovery of the heaviest elements in the periodic table. It is one of only two elements named after a person who was alive at the time of naming, the other being seaborgium, and the only element whose eponym is alive as of 2024. [17] [a]
Hydrogen, as atomic H, is the most abundant chemical element in the universe, making up 75% of normal matter by mass and >90% by number of atoms. [96] In astrophysics, neutral hydrogen in the interstellar medium is called H I and ionized hydrogen is called H II. [97] Radiation from stars ionizes H I to H II, creating spheres of ionized H II ...
A chemical element, often simply called an element, is a type of atom which has a specific number of protons in its atomic nucleus (i.e., a specific atomic number, or Z). [ 1 ] The definitive visualisation of all 118 elements is the periodic table of the elements , whose history along the principles of the periodic law was one of the founding ...
In astronomy, metallicity is the abundance of elements present in an object that are heavier than hydrogen and helium. Most of the normal currently detectable (i.e. non-dark) matter in the universe is either hydrogen or helium, and astronomers use the word "metals" as convenient shorthand for "all elements except hydrogen and helium".
Even so, as physicists started to synthesize elements that are not found in nature, they found the stability decreased as the nuclei became heavier. [17] Thus, they speculated that the periodic table might come to an end. The discoverers of plutonium (element 94) considered naming it "ultimium", thinking it was the last. [18]