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posted by martyb on Thursday November 03 2016, @08:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the uplifting-story dept.

Lithium, the lightest solid element, is created during astrophysical phenomena, but its origin has been elusive. Recently, a group of researchers detected enormous quantities of beryllium-7, an unstable element that decays into lithium in 53.2 days, inside nova Sagittarii 2015 N.2, which suggests that novae are the main source of lithium in the galaxy.

Practically every chemical element has an astronomical origin. Light elements were formed between 10 seconds and 20 minutes after the Big Bang, including hydrogen (75%), helium (25%) and a very small amount of lithium and beryllium.

The remaining chemical elements were formed in stars, either through fusion of other elements inside the nucleus, which begins with the fusion of hydrogen into helium, and produces increasingly heavy elements until iron forms. Other processes such as supernovae explosions or reactions in the atmospheres of giant stars produce gold, lead and copper, among others. Those elements were in turn recycled into new stars and planets, until the present time.

Luca Izzo, researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC), says, "But lithium posed a problem: We knew that 25 percent of existing lithium comes from primordial nucleosynthesis, but we were not able to trace the origins of the remaining 75 percent."

So that's why the hoverboards and Samsung Galaxy Note 7's have been exploding...


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  • (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday November 04 2016, @06:52AM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Friday November 04 2016, @06:52AM (#422394) Journal

    The universe started off with hydrogen and helium, and a negligible amount of anything else. Nuclear fusion in stars was responsible for making carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, neon, magnesium, silicon, sulphur, and iron, cobalt, and nickel. Stellar burning makes free neutrons too, which can be absorbed by those other elements, producing the other elements in between and somewhat higher up the Periodic Table like lead and bismuth. Supernova explosions can make even heavier elements. So these stellar processes can make all of the elements in the Periodic Table, except for three. How about lithium, beryllium, and boron? You can't make them using ordinary nuclear fusion, because adding hydrogen to helium makes Lithium-5, which is unstable, and fusing two heliums makes beryllium-8, which is also unstable. Obviously you can't make those elements by doing fusion of carbon either because carbon is already heavier than they are. We have a very small bit of primordial lithium left over from the beginning of the universe, but the rest was something of a mystery.

    Before this the only known process for making lithium was cosmic ray spallation [wikipedia.org], but it seems that this process can't account for all the lithium we have. I suppose something similar is happening on these white dwarf stars that are undergoing novae: the relatively milder nuclear reactions in the nova take some of the oxygen that makes up the white dwarf and breaks it up into beryllium-7, which decays with a half-life of 53 days into stable lithium-7, the same way cosmic ray spallation does. Perhaps stable beryllium and boron can also be made in the same way.

    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
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