How do stars make heavy elements?
Nuclear fission
How do stars make heavy elements?
Imagine you're baking a cake that needs ingredients from all over the kitchen, not just what's in the cupboard.
Stars mix lighter elements together in their cores, much like using ingredients from different parts of the kitchen to bake a cake. This process creates heavier elements through nuclear fusion and neutron capture, eventually leading to the creation of heavy elements like uranium.
Example
In a star, hydrogen atoms fuse to form helium, and then helium fuses to form heavier elements, similar to combining flour, sugar, and eggs to make a cake, then adding more ingredients for complexity.
Remember this
Stars create heavy elements by fusing lighter elements together, much like combining ingredients to bake a complex cake.
Text adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Related concepts
Big Bang nucleosynthesis
Why did the universe start with just hydrogen and helium?
Chronology of the universe
Did you know the universe's first 10 minutes shaped everything we see today?
Force
Why can't you push a magnet to make it move?
Emergence
Why do simple ingredients create something complex and delicious?
Electron
Ever wondered why some materials heat up quickly while others don't?
Higgs mechanism
W and Z bosons have masses around 80 GeV/c²
Swipe through 100 ML concepts daily
Open Pocket Polymath