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Stars fuse light elements to heavier ones in their cores, giving off energy in the process known as stellar nucleosynthesis. Nuclear fusion reactions create many of the lighter elements, up to and including iron and nickel in the most massive stars. Products of stellar nucleosynthesis remain trapped in stellar cores and remnants except if ...
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 ...
The stable alpha elements are: C, O, Ne, Mg, Si, and S. The elements Ar and Ca are "observationally stable". They are synthesized by alpha capture prior to the silicon fusing stage, that leads to Type II supernovae. Si and Ca are purely alpha process elements. Mg can be separately consumed by proton capture reactions.
The need for a physical description was already inspired by the relative abundances of the chemical elements in the solar system. Those abundances, when plotted on a graph as a function of the atomic number of the element, have a jagged sawtooth shape that varies by factors of tens of millions (see history of nucleosynthesis theory). [4]
The key parameter which allows one to calculate the effects of Big Bang nucleosynthesis is the baryon/photon number ratio, which is a small number of order 6 × 10 −10. This parameter corresponds to the baryon density and controls the rate at which nucleons collide and react; from this it is possible to calculate element abundances after ...
Ruthenium and rhodium are precious metals produced as a small percentage of the fission products from the nuclear fission of uranium.The longest half-lives of the radioisotopes of these elements generated by nuclear fission are 373.59 days for ruthenium and 45 days for rhodium [clarification needed].
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]
Heavy metals is a controversial and ambiguous term [2] for metallic elements with relatively high densities, atomic weights, or atomic numbers.The criteria used, and whether metalloids are included, vary depending on the author and context and it has been argued that the term "heavy metal" should be avoided.