this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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Do you have some more reading about this? The wikipedia article doesn't really touch on it.
The assumption is that the only way lead can exist is via a series of radioactive decay. It is a way. It is generally created in stars by a much more direct process, not through radioactive decay.
Is there an emperic difference (like the isotope number or whatever) between lead created through radioactive decay and lead created directly in a star?
So the meme is incomplete, but the general point still stands from what I can tell, right? Stars take orders of magnitude longer than 4k years to create lead as well, and there is no way of lead being created that could happen in 4k years, unless you start getting into "God made the universe look old" territory?
I mean, it's created at a cosmic rate in the right sized star.
You'd need to back up and start talking about the big bang and star formation, and at that point lead isn't really part of the argument. Most elements exist as a result of stars smashing atoms as per my understanding.
In a single star the heaviest element you can make is Iron.
To get anything heavier than Iron, which Lead is, you need your first start to blow up making iron, and the stuff left behind to eventually form a bigger star, then that star needs to blow up (where you'll get some gold, lead and a few other slightly heavier elements. Then the remaining parts of the star need to form a neutron star. You then need that neutron star to find and eventually crash into another neutron star, and thats where you get the really heavy elements like uranium.
So does that imply that Lead has existed in the universe strictly longer than Uranium? Is the meme entirely backwards?
I think it could, yes. Not much (more comes out in the neutron star on neutron star action), but yes some from single large start explosions.
Thats correct, but the meme is written as a scientific explanation and its is wrong/incomplete. To correct it, go with what you said, not with what the meme says.
Yeah, not really defending the meme. I just lazily cross-posted it from !science_memes@mander.xyz, but the discussion here has been great
Not really, the original point was to prove the earth isn't 4000 years old. Even if this were the only way lead could be created I'm assuming some portion of the decay could take place in space and then be part of the earth's formation.
Stellar element synthesis is where most elements, iron and below, form. Hydrogen, the most common element, fuses to Helium, Lithium. There are more cycles to stars burning elements, Carbon-Nitrogren-Oxygen Cycle, and a bunch of other stuff, all the way up to Iron. After Iron, nuclear fusion can no longer sustain the star, and it collapses into a neutron star (or any other intermediary ranging from hypothetical quark stars to black holes).
On collapse, you get a supernova. Supernova and other high energy events (called Gamma Ray Bursts, usually attributed to Supernova anyway) explode in a shower of neutrinos and gamma rays. These neutrinos rarely interact with matter since they have no charge, but they still contain a lot of energy, traveling near the speed of light. Gamma rays are the highest energy photons. Anything either particle interacts with will change it.
The collision of the gamma rays burst and nuetrinos with interstellar matter creates the remainder of the elements, much in a similar way we do on earth to create the synthetic elements (like plutonium).
Any isotope can be created this way. Isotopes that are unstable then decay until they become something stable - Uranium -> Lead.
The universe is so old that enough of these elements were able to gather by gravity, forming the relatively tiny deposits we can find on our planet.
If you want a layman approach then this Youtube video about where gold comes from is pretty good. You can skip most of the first half about the culture of gold. The second half of the video is the creation part.
If you want a technical approach then you want to talk about Rapid Neutron Capture and GRB. You'll find that kind of talk here. Warning: When you start digging deep into scientific explanations you discover that there's more we don't know. As the article ends with the idea that our current working theory of r-process doesn't happen often enough to explain how much gold we have so there's likely at least one other way gold is created in the universe. Welcome to cutting edge science!
Thanks!