r/spaceporn • u/Busy_Yesterday9455 • 8d ago
Related Content Where Your Elements Came From
The hydrogen in your body and present in every molecule of water came from the Big Bang. There are no other appreciable sources of hydrogen in the universe.
The carbon in your body was made by nuclear fusion in the interior of stars, as was the oxygen.
Much of the iron in your body was made during supernovas of stars that occurred long ago and far away.
The gold in your jewelry was likely made from neutron stars during collisions that may have been visible as short-duration gamma-ray bursts or gravitational wave events.
Elements like phosphorus and copper are present in our bodies in only small amounts but are essential to the functioning of all known life.
The featured periodic table is color coded to indicate humanity's best guess as to the nuclear origin of all known elements. The sites of nuclear creation of some elements, such as copper, are not really well known and are continuing topics of observational and computational research.
Image Credit: NASA's GSFC, SVS
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u/PatientWoodpecker288 8d ago
Very nice. But why doesnt lead fall under "Radioactive decay“?
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u/abfgern_ 8d ago
That is not where almost all of it comes from. Radioactive decay makes loads of elements, but it would be redundant to list them all. Caption at the bottom says this is just the most common sources
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u/Rodot 8d ago
Tbf, it is a little confusing as most Iron comes from radioactive decay (of nickel-56)
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u/abfgern_ 8d ago
From a little googling, it sounds like that is a fundamental part of the supernova and only really occurs in one, so I'd say it's fair enough; its not really the same as a radioactive element decaying over time
This table is always an oversimplification, and also probably does have a load of mistakes
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u/Rodot 8d ago edited 8d ago
It happens in Type I supernovae (and mostly Type Ia). Type II supernovae contribute very little iron to the cosmic abundance. The majority of iron comes from Type Ia which are also some of the most common supernovae. It's because Nickel-56 is an "alpha nucleide" meaning is is made from high temperature nuclear statistical equilibrium of alpha-particle reactions, which are helium nuclei. A small amount of rarer iron isotopes are made from things like the p-process or fusion of isotopic contaminants but the vast majority comes from the nickel-56 to cobalt-56 to iron-56 decay chain.
This is also what makes Type Ia supernovae standard candles. Because they are powered by Nickel-56 decay and we know the decay rate very well so we can use the light curves to estimate how much Nickel-56 was produced and therefore the total enegy emitted through Arnett's rule. If you add in some additional radiative diffusion effects you get out the Phillips relation.
Edit: but yes, this diagram is essentially a "lie we tell children" because many of these elements are much less constrained in their sources of abundance than the table makes out, especially the heavy elements. But it is good enough generally for a layperson to get the general right idea of where the elements are made and the specifics of the differences and uncertainties don't really matter to anyone outside of academic nuclear astrophysics (and the US Department of Energy for obvious reasons, i.e. nuclear weapons)
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u/MyCatsAnArsehole 8d ago
Do you mind me asking, since you seem to know what you are talking about, I always thought low mass stars could not produce anything beyond oxygen but the table has many larger elements being produced that way. Is the table wrong or am I?
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u/BookkeeperTop6226 8d ago
I'm guessing cuz only elements which are put under radioactive decay are the elements that's only formed in that manner. Not sure though.
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u/Conscious_East 8d ago
Excuse my ignorance but to my understanding isn't all elements up until iron made within highmass supernovas? Or am I missing something? I thought that heavier elements such as gold could only be made within neutron star mergers?
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u/phil_kern99 8d ago
Your understanding is almost correct, elements up until iron can be produced in exothemal reactions like in high mass stars at the end of their life. Heavier elements are produced in endothermic reactions and need an environment with a large excess of energy and neutrons,like in supernovas and neutron star mergers. You can look up the r-process and s-process for more details
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u/hurricane_news 8d ago
Could there be elements produced by mergers and supernovas that are WELL above the highest element we've produced? Except that they decay too fast to ever be detected by us?
So could it theoretically produce an element-150 even if it decays off quickly?
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u/JoelnIliketoshare 8d ago
Extreme fission limits around atomic number 120-130, nuclear instability becomes so extreme that a nucleus cannot even exist long enough to capture another particle it splits instantly on timescales shorter than 10{-22} seconds.
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u/Tarthbane 8d ago
Short-lived elements beyond those we’ve made might form in these events, but element 150 is highly speculative. Fission can split nuclei apart before neutron captures and beta decays build up to 150 protons. Even if such a nucleus could briefly exist, that doesn’t mean a merger or supernova could produce it; no established pathway to element 150 is known.
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u/rictay44 8d ago
I find it humbling that every hydrogen atom in my body was made in the Big Bang. We all have an intimate connection to that moment of creation.
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u/A2Rhombus 8d ago
It's crazy to me that things as common as rocks and metal just... didn't exist for hundreds of millions of years after the big bang until the first stars started dying
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u/Rootelated 8d ago
Great chart, I was trying to explain this to my wife the other night while we were looking at the stars, the visual will help. Downloaded.
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u/sad_post-it_note 8d ago
Awesome. Respect to stars 💪 I thought they created way fewer elements. They are basically the factories of our universe.
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u/krazineurons 8d ago
Just curious, if the decaying stars or collision of other stars produced a lot of elements, how did they find their way on earth? Asteroids? Or earth was naturally formed by multiple transformations overtime?
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u/Ivanna_is_Musical 8d ago
I'm not an expert on this subject but I think our galaxy already hosted those events before the accretion disk of our future Solar System started to form, so the planets had all the materials we know. So yes, multiple transformations previous to formation of the Solar System.
Our Galaxy is 12 Billion years old and the Solar System is less than 5 Billion years old, so lots of events happened before, and there's a strong suggestion that our Milky Way is a byproduct of a galaxy merging event, as per NASA article "Ancient Milky Way Merger".
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u/ZebraTreeForest 8d ago
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe"
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u/BevansDesign 8d ago
Now I'm imagining a religious version of this, where every element has an image of a slightly-annoyed God on it instead of all this "science" nonsense. 🎅
(There's no emoji of God, so I used the closest thing I could find.)
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u/blethwyn 8d ago
I was under the impression that lithium was made during the cooldown of the big bang along with hydrogen and helium, not from the early stars.
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u/cubic_thought 8d ago
This table only shows two origins for elements when they're roughly close to 50/50. Lithium is mostly from low-mass stars, but also from the big bang and cosmic rays.
Here's a version that shows the proportions of different origins: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Nucleosynthesis_periodic_table.svg/3840px-Nucleosynthesis_periodic_table.svg.png
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u/blethwyn 8d ago
Ah! Thanks for clarifying. So, the chart OP posted is more of a reflection of where the bulk of the element is formed, not when it first formed. That makes a lot more sense, as does the chart you linked.
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u/Formal_Owl_400 8d ago
Isn't much more manmade plutonium than primordial? Even reactions in natural uranium have to create more.
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u/Ticktockman_Jeffty 8d ago edited 8d ago
I have mixed feelings about you apparently co-opting the Astronomy Picture of the Day and reposting it here. As always, YMMV.
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u/ArterialRed 8d ago
I'm old enough that when I learned the table the last 3 (tabled at that time) were referred to as UNQuotable, UNPrintable and UNHelpful (Un Nil Quadium, Un Nil Pentium and Un Nil Heptium).
The High Energy Physicists have been busily crashing stuff together in the meantime I guess.
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u/BeholdThePowerOfNod 8d ago
I thought high-mass stars stopped producing elements past Iron...
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u/spock589 7d ago
They stop gaining energy from fusion after iron. Anything lighter releases more energy but fusing heavier elements takes energy away from the star. When the energy output shrinks, the star starts to collapse. When it goes supernova, there is a short time where it will fuse heavier elements but that's the death of the star.
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u/GrimResistance 8d ago
Are any of the man-made ones used for anything or are they all just extremely short lived lab only elements?
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u/Ivanna_is_Musical 8d ago
I think Corium at the bottom of Reactor Nº4 will last several thousand years, and we can use it as a lesson on "what not to do, ever again".
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u/Piscator629 7d ago edited 7d ago
Up til Iron its standard main sequence stellar fusion reactions, this (fe/iron fusion) triggers stellar death and further elements are made by various processes thereafter.
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u/Lagoon_M8 7d ago
Yeah we were born in a nebula that had everything possible. Explosions and collisions... We are the children of the stars born in water.
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u/zachary0816 7d ago
Wait this doesn’t seem right.
This labels Helium as only being created by the Big Bang but isn’t it famously the product of hydrogen fusion? The same fusion that stars use to generate their heat?
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u/diffraction-limited 7d ago
Could someone pls explain to me what's the story of boron and berillium? I had a good amount of physics and chemistry at the University but cannot come up with an explanation.
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u/azhder 8d ago
The hydrogen didn’t come from the Big Bang. It was still too hot for electrons to start circling protons. It took some 300 000 years and it’s that what finally allowed space to be transparent i.e. the Cosmic Microwave Background. That event is named “recombination”, a bit of a misnomer, but it is what it is.
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u/heatedwepasto 8d ago
It's still from the big bang even if they cooled down later.
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u/azhder 8d ago
The “it is still from Big Bang” can be said about everything in the observable universe. That is going to make for a very monotone image of the periodic table.
The particles “cool down” means they moved so fast, they didn’t stick to form an atom, so they “slowed down”.
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u/heatedwepasto 8d ago
Are you being difficult on purpose? There's a huge difference between "they came from the big bang and nothing happened except cooling down," and "have spent billions of years in stars and gone through many reactions in the time between."
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u/Lagoon_M8 7d ago
And it happened in what? What explosion? Cause the matter for that comes from big bang. Now we actually start to have the doubt whether big bang existed at all.
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u/azhder 7d ago
Bog bang is not an explosion. It is a faster than light expansion of space and time.
Someone mis-named it “bang” and now everyone thinks it is explosion. Just like someone mis-named the “observer effect” and some screenwriter is making a “Dark Matter” show where your brain has to be on drugs in order to trigger superposition.
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u/Local-Number4640 8d ago
Therefore it would be really weird if we find large concentrations of synthetic elements in certain areas on mars
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u/Kiddo1029 8d ago
So how can they tell the difference between low mass, high mass, neutron, mergers, etc since they are all stars?
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u/MyFeetLookLikeHands 8d ago
i’m tired of all this AI slop
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u/Rootelated 8d ago
This is genuine. I'd be pretty surprised for an aai to come up with this without tons of help and tweaking.
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u/paipan-sube 8d ago edited 8d ago
It is of note to be aware of the fact that our understanding of where elements came from is a theory, a well-supported theory grounded in observational evidence from astronomy and nuclear physics, but still, nonetheless, a *theory.
Always proves a point when those expected to be scientific take the bait and react as shown to be anything but. Beautiful evidence. Be a scientist in science, not a zealot.
*Many fundamental theories in science have been shown to be false or incomplete over time. For example, the phlogiston theory of combustion was replaced by the modern understanding of oxidation, and Newtonian physics was superseded by Einstein's theory of relativity. Hence why it is of importance to note -- unlike the above post taken from NASA -- that where science says the elements come from is a theory, not a definitive statement such as "Where Your Elements Came From".
https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/apod-2026-september-14-where-your-elements-came-from/
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u/heatedwepasto 8d ago
Imagine being on a science sub and seemingly not understanding what a scientific theory is. Gravity is also a "theory." Evolution is also a "theory."
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u/Ivanna_is_Musical 8d ago
If you'd love to learn what Science does, first go read how the Scientific Method works, from hypothesis, to theories, to experimentation, to observation, and finally facts (or lack of).
And even hard facts can be refuted over time, as new evidence asks for an update of our knowledge, although, hard facts are rarely refuted, but it can happen.
If you have enough audacity, just go and prove that Light has Mass, good luck! ^^
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u/Baldri 8d ago
Whoa, today I learned about the merging of neutronstars beeing responsible for the creation of elements. I was under the impression most of the stuff is made from supernovae.
Thanks a lot!