In the first episode of his famous TV series about space,
“Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” the late astronomer Carl Sagan
wastes no time dramatically setting the stage.
“The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean,”
Sagan says. “Some part of our being knows this is where we came
from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also
within us. We’re made of star stuff. We are a
way for the cosmos to know itself.”
Building on that spirit, Jennifer A. Johnson, an astronomer at
the Ohio State University, has hacked the periodic table of
elements to show exactly what kind of “star stuff” Sagan is
talking about, and how much.
Her graphic below, which we first saw in a
tweet by science writer Corey Powell, shows the violent
cosmic origins of every element in the solar system — including
all of the atoms in our bodies:
A
periodic table of chemical elements showing where every atom in
the solar system comes from.
Jennifer
A. Johnson/The Ohio State University; NASA;
ESA
Johnson said the idea for plotting out the origins of periodic
elements started at a meeting 8 years ago with fellow astronomer
Inese Ivans, but that early attempts (like
this one) were unsatisfying.
“Once you have spent ~20 years getting […] this info into your
brain, the main difficulty is not wanting to make the plot too
complicated to include every little detail,” Johnson told
Business Insider in an email. “In several cases I needed to say
‘OK, that’s close enough to get the point across’.”
She ultimately color-coded six types of cosmic events that can
forge new atoms: the Big Bang, cosmic rays,
merging neutron stars, and three different classes of
exploding stars. Each portion of color shows the relative amount
of element the event made.
The
Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
It shows that many critical elements in our bodies — oxygen (O),
phosphorus (P), and sulfur (S) — came out of giant exploding
stars called supernova, while others — like carbon (C) and
nitrogen (N) — came from dying, sun-like stars. Hydrogen (H),
meanwhile, which is a key component of water, came out of the Big
Bang.
Johnson said all the scientific evidence behind the chart is not
her doing and “goes back decades,” yet is still evolving.
“You have stars with the mass of the Sun dying, you have massive
stars and white dwarfs blowing up, you have neutron stars […]
then swirling into each other and merging,” she said. “It’s hard
work!”
The elements technetium (Tc) and promethium (Pm) are gray,
Johnson says, “because the only time we see them is when we make
them in colliders or nuclear bombs.”
Johnson said one thing her chart doesn’t show is how long it took
to get each element. To get all the core elements of life in the
right abundances, for example, plus rock-building elements —
magnesium (Mg), silicon (Si), and iron (Fe) — it took billions
upon billions of years.
“So right after the Big Bang — no planets, no life until stars
had time to enrich the Universe,” she said. “‘So ‘long ago, in a
galaxy far, far, away’ can’t have been too long ago!”
If the contrast isn’t shining through very well, Johnson also
made a colorblind-friendly version of the chart.
from SAI http://ift.tt/2jxLHSE
via IFTTT
