Don, you have asked a question that's related to what I think is my absolute favorite fact in the universe, and that is that we are made of dead stars. And that's literally true.
The atoms in our bodies were actually created inside the cause of stars that then it exploded and died, or unraveled into space. And so your question about the periodic table is very interesting.
Well, what's the periodic table like at the beginning of the universe, the moment of Big Bang? Well one thing I can say, it was a lot simpler.
Eh, The Big Bang, when it went off, produced basically three elements. Almost everything was hydrogen.
There was a little bit of helium, and a tiny tiny little smattering of lithium as well. So those three elements were around just a couple of minutes after the formation of the universe, but nothing else.
And, and that's actually not a theory. That's actually something we can observe.
One of the wonderful things about being an astronomer is, as you look out into space farther and farther away, the light has taken longer to get to you. And the farthest we can see is actually back to a time only about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
And really, at that time, there was nothing but very hot hydrogen gas, and a little bit of helium and lithium as well. So everything larger than that, every atom more complex, had to be formed inside a star.
Over time, our stars, like the sun, are pretty good over the life circle of producing things like carbon and oxygen. They don't really get much more far off the periodic table than that.
If you want to go any farther than the element iron, you actually need a very violent explosion, a supernova explosion. The cores of very massive stars - by that I mean stars that are 10,20 maybe as much as 50 times the mass of the sun,
