60 Years Of Starstuff: How Humanity Discovered Where Our Elements Come From
“They showed how aging stars that were massive enough, such as Red Giants and Supergiants, could find it energetically feasible to create all the elements up to iron in their cores. The even-higher elements could be produced in the extreme conditions of a supernova explosion, upon which the full gamut of elements would be released into space.”
Throughout the 1940s, 50s and even 60s, a debate as to the origin of the Universe raged in astrophysics. Was the Big Bang theory, where the Universe emerged from a hot, dense state some finite time ago, or the Steady-State theory, where the Universe always had the same density and properties, correct? Two very different pictures of the Universe emerged, but more interestingly, they each predicted a very different origin for the chemical elements in the Universe. The Big Bang theorists preferred a Universe where the hot, dense stage of the early, post-Big Bang Universe created the heavy elements, while the Steady-State camp predicted those elements would originate in stars. 60 years ago, in 1957, theory and experiment came together to show that stellar nucleosynthesis is the answer.
That didn’t mean the Big Bang was wrong, but it did mean that the build up of the periodic table didn’t happen early; it happened late! Come get the full story thanks to the incredible Paul Halpern.
