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Hello.
My name is James Connelly, and
I'm with the Center for Star and
Planet Formation, Natural History Museum
of Denmark, University of Copenhagen.
The segment is
discussing nuclear synthesis or
the origin of elements
in our solar system.
Nuclear synthesis models come from
three separate lines of evidence.
The first,
composition of our solar system and
by that I mean the elemental abundances
that we have within our solar system.
The second comes from experiments on
nuclear reactions under set conditions in
the laboratory.
And the third is theoretical constraints
on possible sites or environments for
these nucleosynthetic reactions that
we imagine within the laboratory.
The most important of these constraints
is possibly the composition of
the solar system.
So let's just review for
a second the atomic structure.
We have the nucleus of an atom,
which is made up of two fundamental
particles, the neutrons and protons.
The elements character is defined by the
number of protons in the nucleus.
And the number of protons is matched by
the number of electrons in the shell of
electrons that are orbiting
around the nucleus.
The second fundamental component
of the nucleus are neutrons.
If the protons give the
element its fundamental character,
the neutrons are adding
mass to the nuclei, but
don't actually determine
any of the properties.
The other important thing to know
about the atomic structure is
that an element then is defined
by the number of protons,
whereas the number of neutrons
can vary for a given element.
And this gives us different
isotopes of a set element.
So in this example you see here,
we have beryllium, which
comprises four protons and
it has five neutrons.
The neutron number can vary, but
the protons for beryllium is set.
This is a diagram where we have

on the x axis the number of neutrons

that exist within the nucleus
and on the y axis the number of protons.
You can see the black squares
that form the center of this array,
those are the stable nuclei that
we have within the elements that
we have within our solar system.
There are 80 elements that occur,
339 naturally occurring isotopes of
these elements within our solar system.
This is a much more familiar presentation
of the elements that we have.
You'll all recognize the periodic table,
in which we have
an organized array of all the different
elements, where we give some indication of
their chemical properties according
to the way this is organized.
But this gives us no information about
the relative abundance of any of
the elements that you see here.
Or any information about the isotopes that
might exist for each of these elements.
This is a more useful presentation for the
elemental abundances of the solar system.
You can see here that along
the x-axis you have the element number.
So you go from hydrogen and helium in
the lower left hand corner of
the diagram, all the way up to
uranium as the heaviest element we have.
And the relative abundance in
a log scale along the Y axis,
so you can see that hydrogen and
helium by far make up the majority of the
elements that we have in our solar system.
In fact, they make up almost 99% of
the elements that we have today,
and we go down to, all the way down to
uranium, which is the least abundant.
So the nucleus synthetic
models that we try and develop
to explain where the elements come from,
it has to explain this relative abundance.
How do we know the elemental abundance
of the solar system as presented in
this diagram?
That comes from several different sources,
but
one of the main sources that
we use are meteorites.
Those stones that fall from space
down onto Earth, we go out and
we can collect those.
And there are certain type of
of meteorites that are called chondrites.
They are the most primitive.
They are like cosmic sediments.
And these meteorites are what we

use to represent the composition

of the solar system before we had
the formation of planets and so on.
So we use these as a proxy for
the bulk composition of our solar system.
And they're very good for
most of the elements, but they're
not especially good for noble gases and
some of the volatile elements, which
isn't critical for the discussion today.
Okay, so now we move on to this issue of,
how are the elements formed?
There was two major hypotheses presented,
in about the late 1940's or
early 1950's, which tried to explain this
distribution of the elements that
we have within our solar system.
The first one is referred to Big-Bang
nucleosynthesis, and it won a Nobel Prize
in 1967 in physics for its explanation
of where all the elements came from.
It turned out to be incorrect,
as we'll see in a second.
A second model known as stellar
nucleosynthesis presented by Burbridge,
Burbridge, Fowler and Hoyle which
became known as the B2FH model.
This became the standard
model which we use today
for explaining nucleosynthesis.
This also won a Nobel Prize in 1983.
So, we're not going to consider any
longer the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, but
we'll instead investigate, or
discuss the stellar nucleosynthesis also,
know as the B2FH
which we'll refer to later.
Okay, within this model,
there are three categories of nuclide.
And when I say nuclide,
I mean just that
these are just the elements and
their isotopes.
So nuclide production.
There are three different categories
of nuclide production in this model.
The first is Big Bang products,
hydrogen, helium, minor lithium,
beryllium and boron.
They were all formed,
as we'll see in a second, in the Big Bang.
The second is referred to as stellar
fusion products, that goes from lithium
all the way up to the iron group elements,
including iron, cobalt, and nickel.
And then we have the third group,
which is the products of nucleosynthesis
related to stars and supernovae.
And we'll explain that in a second.
But they generate all

the elements heavier than iron,

including some lighter elements like
aluminum, silicon, titanium, and vanadium.
Okay, first to explore then
the Big Bang nucleus synthesis.
In the simplest terms this is the
elements that would have been formed
at the instant that the solar,
or sorry the universe formed.
These are referred to as
Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
This is what we inherited
in the very short
period of time immediately
after the Big Bang.
And as I said a minute ago that
is mainly hydrogen and helium.
And so at the instant of
the Big Bang you would have had
fundamental particles of only protons and
neutrons.
And those protons and neutrons would
have
begun to form as the system
cooled, you would begin to have
the protons and neutrons coming together,
in the first step in this diagram,
to form hydrogen atoms.
These hydrogen atoms
as time went on and
things got cooler, we are still in the very
brief period of the Big Bang.
Hydrogen would have started to combine
together to give you helium-3, and
then helium-3 would have
combined together with
other hydrogen atoms
to give you helium-4.
So you have hydrogen and
helium in the immediate moments after the
Big Bang would have formed, and cooling
would have come down to the point where
you could have these nuclides existing.
But, the original Big Bang
nucleus synthetic models suggested that
all the elements were formed this way
in the instant after the Big Bang
that you would have, as cooling
progressed you could have put
these fundamental particles of
protons and neutrons, hydrogen and
helium together to get you all the way up
to the highest and/or heaviest elements.
But it turns out that there is
a fundamental barrier that exists at
beryllium and lithium.
So that as you try to build heavier
elements from beryllium and lithium,
you can't get above lithium-7
because as you add another

proton to lithium, you end

up producing helium again.
So you come back down to
these lighter isotopes.
So you basically spin within this cycle,
and you can't get beyond this
limited array of light elements.
So we need another model, which is where
this, the stellar nucleosynthesis came
into play, to explain the existence
of all the heavier elements.
So let's look again at a different type
of diagram which looks again with the X
axis with the mass number which
is to say lightest isotopes on
the left hand side and
heaviest elements on the right hand side.
The mass number refers to as the number
of protons and neutrons together.
So hydrogen helium
again at the left hand side.
Uranium at the right hand
side of this diagram.
As you look at the y-axis.
The y-axis refers to
the binding energy of
the nucleus of these
different elements.
And you'll see a very important point in
this diagram is that you go from
a low binding energy at hydrogen and
helium up to a maximum at iron 56.
And then you begin to decrease again
all the way up to uranium 238.
So the important thing to take away from
this diagram is that there is a maximum.
There's a maximum binding energy
at iron 56 that is important for
nucleosynthetic models.
Everything to the left of iron 56 would
prefer to combine together in reactions
which we could call fusion reactions.
In which energy is emitted.
These atoms would prefer, or nuclei would
prefer to come together to form more and
more stable, nuclei, up until iron 56.
But fusion cannot proceed above
iron 56 because you get lower and
lower binding energies
from that point forward.
So this diagram is split into two regions.
The left hand region which we'll
refer to as fusion reactions.
And the right hand side of the diagram,
which we refer to neutron
capture reactions.
And they require two
different processes to give
you all of the different
elements in this diagram.

So let's first look at

the fusion reactions.
That you see on the left-hand
side of this diagram.
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