Birth of element XI

Once we have this blob of dark matter, gravity force the ordinary gas in and it starts to form this cloud of gas, or the molecular cloud, and the core of the molecular cloud further collapses and start producing something rather dense that would eventually become a star. We can reproduce this process in a computer disc days. If we go further with this computer simulation, then this initial form of star would start to accumulate more stuff from outside, by a gravitational pull. But once they start accumulate so densely, and then it starts to actually eject it off. It was sort of blowing out, by the reaction, so that's something we can see in computer simulation, so for a while dust just settles on the surface of this protostar. It's not quite a star yet, but as it keeps accumulating on the surface, we see this ejection of material, in the polar direction. So it stops growing at that stage, because whatever settles in further gets blown out, so the stars wouldn't grow anymore. So what do we learn is that, the first stars can grow only up to like forty solar masses. But that is big enough to synthesize the elements all the way up to Iron at this stage, and that's how we believe that initial elements have been synthesized inside the stars.

So, going back the very beginning, we start with only hydrogen and helium. We ask the question, where we could have possibly come from because we need carbon, oxygen and so on. The answer turns out to be that they were built in stars, and we are the star dust. We can only go up to an iron, can't go beyond that because you can't release energy by shedding mass beyond iron. We know that there are elements that are heavier than iron, like what you might buy in a jewelery store. So we need a mechanism, to produce those elements as well. And indeed, if we look at the so called abundance of these elements in a universe and that we do see all these heavier elements, like silver, gold, and platinum, lead, they must have been produced somewhere. We don't quite know where they came from.

Many of us think that these heavier elements have been formed when the star is exploding. We talked about elements synthesized that are core, explosion releases. But explosion itself may bring the reaction even further. And explosion is such a dynamic process, that we can even put energy in to let the reaction happen. So presumably that's the way these heavier elements have been formed. What we know, is that proton neutron have very similar masses within only like 2 per mole.

But if we think of possible universe, where the proton may be say 20% heavier than neutron. Heavier E=mc squared means more energy. So proton can then release energy by turning into a, a neutron in that case. All the protons end up decaying, in neutron if it is heavier by 20 percent. So if that's the case, even if we manage to synthesize like helium nucleus, protons in the nucleus would decay into neutrons. They're all electrically neutral. So we don't end up with anything that can become the atomic nucleus at the end of the day. So no atoms were possible at all. So the very existence of chemical elements, actually hinges on the fact that proton, and neutron are pretty much the same in their mass. So that's one, another mystery we don't quite understand.

Why are the masses of particles, designed in such a way, that somehow all this important things that

would sustain our life would become possible. Even if we do manage to form these atomic nuclei, we still need electrons to go around them to form atoms. So how the atoms were possible, why was that possible? That’s the next question, about the Higgs boson.