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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.
Helium is the smallest and the lightest noble gas and one of the most unreactive elements, so it was commonly considered that helium compounds cannot exist at all, or at least under normal conditions. [1] Helium's first ionization energy of 24.57 eV is the highest of any element. [2]
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 ...
Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei (for example, nuclei of hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium), combine to form one or more atomic nuclei and neutrons. The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or absorption of energy .
In stars between 9 and 11 solar masses, the 16 O already produced by helium fusion in the previous stage of stellar evolution manages to survive the carbon-burning process pretty well, despite some of it being used up by capturing 4 He nuclei. [1] [8] So the result of carbon burning is a mixture mainly of oxygen, neon, sodium and magnesium. [3] [5]
Helium is the least water-soluble monatomic gas, [96] and one of the least water-soluble of any gas (CF 4, SF 6, and C 4 F 8 have lower mole fraction solubilities: 0.3802, 0.4394, and 0.2372 x 2 /10 −5, respectively, versus helium's 0.70797 x 2 /10 −5), [97] and helium's index of refraction is closer to unity than that of any other gas. [98]
Of particular importance is carbon because its formation from He is a bottleneck in the entire process. Carbon is produced by the triple-alpha process in all stars. Carbon is also the main element that causes the release of free neutrons within stars, giving rise to the s-process, in which the slow absorption of neutrons converts iron into ...
The CNO cycle (for carbon–nitrogen–oxygen; sometimes called Bethe–Weizsäcker cycle after Hans Albrecht Bethe and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker) is one of the two known sets of fusion reactions by which stars convert hydrogen to helium, the other being the proton–proton chain reaction (p–p cycle), which is more efficient at the Sun's ...