Birth of element I
At the very beginning of the universe even atoms didn't exist. It was such a hot
and dense soup of elementary particles. Where
did the elements come from? This question is related to something we have heard about
recently named the Higgs boson that have been discovered last July, an experiment
called LHC, at the Swiss
French border. How the atomic nuclei had
been formed? It has happened when the universe
was like three minutes old. How the Higgs boson came to be and atoms
were born that had to do with the time of the universe when it was only a trillionth
of a second old. We are going back to, even much
closer, to the beginning of the very big bang
itself by studying the origin of the chemical elements and atoms.
Everything
around us is made
of atoms, and atoms
are made of electrons
and nuclei. So it's sort of like
a solar system
where all the planets revolve around the sun. Electrons in atoms revolve around the
nucleus. Atomic nuclei
can be further divided up into smaller pieces namely,
neutrons, which
don't have electric charges and proton, which has the positive
electric charge. And if you look even closer, it turns out the neutrons and protons are not elementary objects either, they are made out
of even smaller pieces called quarks. Both neutron and proton have
three quarks inside so you glue neutron protons together to build up their atomic nuclei and the number of protons is the key to
determine the nature of that atomic element.
There are so many elements in periodic
table, more than 100 of them. The surroundings are made up of about 90 of those, and we need
all of these things to explain all of the objects we see around us today.
But it turns out at the very beginning of the universe, at the big bang
there were only hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen nucleus is
composed of just one proton and nothing else. And helium
is made of two protons and two neutrons. And they are the only chemical elements that existed right
after the big bang.
But we, our body, have a
lot of other elements in it. We need carbon,
nitrogen, oxygen. For example, even all the way
up to iron. We actually need all of these
elements to make up our body. So, that's the
natural question here. How were all these
elements born, when the big bang itself produced only hydrogen and helium. So
how were the bigger elements formed out of the
smaller elements?
CONTD.....
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