Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What are the most common elements in the Universe?

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

Daniel and Kelly talk about how elements were made in the early Universe, what processes are making more of them today, and why some elements are more common than others.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free iHeartRadio app. Search all the smoke and listen now. Hey, Kelly, I've got a weird question for you. You know, we are going to have to recalibrate weird after all of the strange questions that you ask me on this show. All right, well, here's the question. What's the most common ingredient in your pantry? Wow. I was expecting you to ask about the ways the universe might incinerate my children.

All right, so in the pantry, let's see. By volume, probably flour, thanks to Zach's, you know, pandemic baking experiments. I love hearing that. But what about like by number? Do you have more bags of flour than like cans of beans? You know, the answer to that is also flour. So we have like loads of weird kinds of flour, thanks to all of Zach's baking experiments. So we've got like rye, buckwheat, wheat, wheat, chickpea, almonds.

If it's been creative, we've probably tried it. We don't have any cricket flour yet. I know that you can get that on the market, but almost anything else we've probably tried. Sounds like your family is flower-powered. Okay. Flower and butter are the fundamental particles of baking. Maybe I should get to work on a butter collider. See, that's the kind of weird thing I was expecting from you.

I'm here to live up to your expectations. Bravo. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I really do like colliding butter and flour. I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith, a parasitologist with Rice University, and I love consuming the collision of butter and flour, but I tend to stay out of the kitchen for everyone's sake.

And give us a sense for how often Zach's baking experiments have a positive outcome. Like when the kids hear of dad's baking, are they excited? or are they a little worried? They're almost always excited. Zach is actually really good in the kitchen, and most of the time he's not trying to make, like, healthy foods. He's definitely making, like, cakes and pies and muffins and very kid-friendly things. So, yeah, most of the time, the outcome of those collisions is good.

I see, no cricket flour pastry crusts yet. No, no, he's a vegetarian, and I think for him that extends to crickets. All right, and welcome to the podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. in which we experiment with cooking up the universe into bite-sized chunks for you. We want to take everything that's out there in the universe, the crazy black holes, the cosmic swirls of quasars, the tiny little frothing quantum particles. We want to weave together a story that makes sense to your human brain. Because amazingly, incredibly, we think that a human brain is capable of fashioning stories

about the nature of our universe that makes sense to us, that our little mathematical capsules allow us to predict the future, but also to get a sense of explanation, an understanding of why the universe is this way and not some other way. My friend and co-host, Jorge Cham, can't be with us today. He is somewhere in the jungles of Panama. And so we've invited our frequent guest host, Kelly Weiner Smith, to join us. Kelly, thanks very much for coming on the pot again. I'm excited to be here to cook up brain snacks with you, Daniel.

One of the most amazing things to me about brain snacks and real snacks is that that when we look out in the universe, there's such a huge variety of them. We're lucky to get to eat lots of different kind of things when we live, you know, so many different kinds of fruits and vegetables and pastries filled with incredible stuff. But also just as you look out in the universe,

there's just a lot of different kinds of stuff out there. I mean, there's like blueberries and plants and mushrooms and iPhones and exploding stars. And if you're trying to tackle the question of like, what's out there in the universe and how do we make sense of it? There's a lot of different kinds of things to make sense of, right? So much different kinds of things to make sense of. Yes. And as people have just started gardening,

the like production of those things is mind-blowing, like the fact that our crummy soil produces spicy peppers, how does that happen? It is incredible that we have these little biological machines for assembling spicy peppers basically out of dirt, sunlight, and air, right? Amazing chemistry done by those plants, yes. It is amazing. And at the same time, the universe at its smallest level, like the tiniest little bits that I study in my research seem to be fairly small in number. I mean, there's just like a few particles that make up everything we know. You boil down those peppers or your lunch or your husband into particles. Then you get a hundred elements, right, that basically make up everything.

You tear those apart into protons and neutrons and electrons and you tear the protons and neutrons apart and you're down to just like up quarks and down quarks and electrons. With those three things, you can basically put together everything. So it's a natural sort of philosophical puzzle to understand like, where does complexity arise? Why isn't the universe just a bunch of really simple combinations of these tiny little bits? Why is it possible to make all sorts of complicated things like kittens and husbands and pies? I'm a little concerned that you suggested boiling down my husband, but I'm interested in the topic, so I'm going to move forward with you here. It's just a thought experiment, right?

It's definitely a thought experiment. Nobody should try that at home, either with kittens or husbands. But, you know, kittens and husbands and lava do have something really fascinating in common, which is that they're made of the same ingredients. You know, if you take a kilogram of lava and a kilogram of flour, for example, let's only use non-living examples for now, then they're made of the same bits, the same upcorks and down quarks and electrons, just put together in different ways.

Even if you think about like different elements, different atoms, they're just made out of different numbers of protons and neutrons, but they basically all have the same ratio of one proton to one neutron to one electron. There's not a lot of variation from that in the periodic table. And so everything is just different arrangements of the same stuff. And so by the end of this podcast, I'd like to have a physicist understanding of Carl Sagan's We're All Star Stuff statement. Are you going to give me that by the end of this episode?

By the end of the episode, I'm going to give you. give you a recipe to make literally anything in your kitchen. Start with up quarks and down quarks, add electrons, and you're done. There you go. That's how particle physicists cook. You know, like, it's some sort of crazy artistic license that all cookbooks don't start at the quarks stage. But what are you going to do with these authors?

But it is amazing how many different things you can make out of these basic ingredients, right? It's incredible the complexity that we see out there in the universe. And not even just the biological complexity, but the chemical complexity. the physical complexity. You know, if you started with basic ingredients in your Lego set, you can build essentially anything, right? Having a small number of building blocks, but lots of different ways to assemble them does allow you to introduce complexity in the arrangement. But philosophically, it's fascinating to think about what makes you, you, and what makes lava, is not the particles that you are made out of, but just how they are put together. That means that, like,

the information, the euness of you is somehow just in the relationship. relationship between particles, which makes it seem sort of like ineffable. I'd like to imagine that I'm built out of bits of Daniel and you're built out of bits of Kelly. But you're not. The Kelliness is really just how those same pieces are put together and you could have put them together to make somebody else. So I feel like the choice of your example matters so much in whether this story is uplifting or not. So you know, when you were like bits of Kelly are sort of like lava, I'm like, oh, that's kind of a downer. But, you know, like as a biologist, if you're like, oh, the.

bird in the sky, you share bits with that. That's sort of a beautiful idea. Although maybe a geologist would be like, tone it down, Kelly. Lava's great. Yeah, you'd like to be compared to a pigeon rather than lava. I mean, pigeons are basically sky rats. You know, Rosemary, Moscow wrote a great book on pigeons recently and turned me around on pigeons. And so, yes, I'm fine with being a pigeon. I love rats, though. I don't say sky rats as a negative description. You know, we used to have rats living with us. They're wonderful pets, very smart. So I'm also pro-pigeon. But I got to say, I'd rather be compared to lava. Lava. Lava's definitely hotter than pigeons. And that's the measure for goodness in your life? What has the highest temperature? Hey, you got to go with some quantifiable metric, right?

So does it make the sun the best? The sun is pretty cool, actually, you know? There are definitely hotter things in the universe, the interiors of new drawn stars, for example, core gluon plasmas created at a large haydron collider are hotter than the center or the surface of the sun. So maybe that should be my point of reference perhaps perhaps but today we are not interested in diving deep to understand the core fundamental nature of reality and its materials tearing apart the upcork and downcork into the basic bits that they might be made out of we're going to do something a little different we're going to take a step back and try to understand how those things come together to make the amazing complexity and variety that we do see in our universe because

even if the elements of the periodic table are not a fundamental description of the universe, there are a pretty important part of our lives. You get too much mercury in your breakfast cereal, your life is going to be different. You are built out of carbon and you breathe oxygen. These things are important to understanding how life starts in the universe. And where life can go if it wants to move to different places in the universe. Exactly. And so if you're interested in building kittens or baking pies or assembling podcast hosts, then you want to know where you can find the ingredients. And so today on the podcast, we'll be answering. exactly that question we're going to be talking about what elements are most

common in the universe and we said a minute ago that everything is made out of up quarks and down quarks and electrons and so you might get the sense that it doesn't really matter but there is an important categorization here when you put the up quarks and down corks together to make protons and neutrons you put those together to make elements we tend to count those by the number of protons inside the nucleus, right? So if you have just like a proton with one electron around it, that's hydrogen.

You can add a neutron to it. You still call that hydrogen, right? It's a little bit different. You've added a neutron, but you still call it hydrogen. It's like neutrons aren't as important as the proton and the electron. But if you add another proton to it, then boom, it's another element. It's helium because now, in order to make it neutral, you also need another electron, and that's the key.

The reason that we count things as different elements when you add a proton but not a neutron is that you also have to add that electron and that changes fundamentally the chemical behavior of the thing in a dramatic way because now the bonds that conform are different and its reactivity and whether it emits light or absorbs light, whether it likes to stick to stuff or not really changes. And so while like hydrogen and deuterium are different, adding a neutron to that proton does change it. It's not as big a change as adding a change as adding a proton. So we tend to categorize the stuff in the universe by the number of protons in the nucleus. So if adding another proton means you have to get another electron, why don't we

categorize things by the number of electrons that are in there? A great unanswered question in the history of science. I think it's probably because protons are more massive. And so we used to, before we understood what was inside these things, we used to categorize these things by atomic mass, just like how heavy is a mole of these atoms. And that's the count of the number of protons and neutrons together. And so all we could measure was sort of the atomic mass and the overall charge. So I think it probably comes down just to a bias in terms of the protons because they're heavier and they also contribute to the atomic mass.

But you know, the pro-electron folks have a good argument. Oh, is that still a live debate? No, I would like to imagine that there's like an ancient Victorian society out there that feels like electrons have been overlooked. Got it. I mean, I'm sure there's still somebody. Everyone's got their thing. But the fascinating thing when you look out into the universe is that we don't see all of these elements in equal numbers.

You don't have as much uranium in the universe as you do nickel or as much nickel as you do hydrogen, for example. And understanding where all these things come from requires you to do a deep dive into the history of the universe itself and to understand how all of these things come together, what engines there are out there in the universe capable of manufacturing these crazy elements. Let's see what the audience thought the answer was. Yeah, so as usual, I went out there to our cadre of volunteers to ask them if they knew what the most common elements in the universe were.

If you like to participate in this segment of the podcast and contribute your uneducated speculation for our entertainment purposes only, then please write to me to Questions at Danielanhorpe.com. we'd love to hear your voice on the podcast. So think about it for a minute. Do you know which elements are most common in the universe? Here's what some of our listeners had to say. First of all, I have a fundamental lack of understanding of the periodic table and what an element actually is.

But I'm going to guess hydrogen and maybe helium. I don't know. I think hydrogen is the most common. That's kind of everywhere because it's the one with, it's number one on the, periodic table and it's absolutely everywhere. And I think the next one is helium, which is number two, I don't know if it then continues. I know that as atoms get more protons and neutrons and they get heavier, they become less common, I think, but definitely hydrogen. I think it's dark matter. I don't know if it's really an element that you are thinking about. What's the

definition of an element in that case? I don't know. The most common element in the universe is hydrogen and because of the way fusion works, I think after that is helium. If I remember correctly, I think the most abundant elements in the universe is hydrogen, helium, and oxygen, and maybe carbon. So basically just the few elements on top of the periodic table. The most common in the universe should be hydrogen and helium, but hydrogen by far. and oxygen too other than that is dark matter

element we don't know but that should be the top three elements that we know and we can interact with I think in terms of all the question and answer sessions that I've been around for on this podcast this is the one that had the most consistency in the answers

it seems like most people argued it was hydrogen followed by helium but then there was some question about dark matter and whether it counts as an element or not? And I think that the answer is no. But yeah, what did you think of these answers? Yeah, I was very glad to see that everybody knew the basic story, that hydrogen is the most common thing out there. And we even heard some ideas about why and how these things are made. And so I was very pleased to hear that. I also love the legalistic loophole of like

dark matter. Is that a thing? Is that an element? Does that count? What are you really asking? Is this a trick question? There's a little bit of paranoia there. Is he trying to kill me? That's the other question, I think, when I talk to you. Exactly, because it's important to remember that when we talk about elements, we're talking about atomic matter. We're talking about things made out of atoms. But in the larger accounting of the universe, atomic matter is less than 5% of the energy density

of the universe. If you take like a cubic light year of the universe and you add up all of the energy in there, then like 70% of the energy in that chunk of the universe is devoted to, dark energy, which contributes to the accelerating expansion of the universe. Something like 25% is dark matter, some weird kind of stuff that's out there, but it's invisible and almost intangible. So it's hard to know exactly what it's made out of. And the rest of it, this 5% is the kind of stuff we're talking about today that I'm made

out of and you are made out of and kittens are made out of and pastry crusts are made out of atomic matter. Things built out of protons, neutrons, and electrons. And in understanding what flavor of those elements, we have and in what proportion we're going to understand a lot about the history of the universe and also the role that dark matter played in shaping this universe, even though we currently don't think that dark matter itself is made of atoms. So that means it doesn't have any quarks. So like even one level lower, dark matter doesn't have that either. Yeah, we think that dark matter is

made of something else, not quarks, not electrons, something totally different and weird, a completely different kind of particle, or maybe not even a particle, or maybe many many different kinds of particles, or maybe tiny cosmic kittens. I mean, we're kind of a little bit clueless. You might get the sense. I'm hoping for the cosmic kittens route. So you mentioned hydrogen is the most common thing in the universe by atoms, or that we're going to be talking about today.

Where is that coming from? And hydrogen is the most common thing in the universe, and it's not even close, like not even a little bit. It's a pretty good approximation to say the universe is hydrogen. I mean, if you just said everything in the universe was hydrogen, you'd be getting it 92% correct, which is, hey, that's an A-minus, right? So you could just, like, move on. That's your description of the universe.

You're done. You're satisfied with your grade. So that means that, like, of the atoms that exist in the universe, 92% of them have only a single proton, right? And it's incredible. Like, most of the universe is hydrogen. It's really just a tiny little bit. Like, the rest of the universe is just, like, the spice in the recipe. So, like, as a biologist, I always think about parsimony.

And so to me, I feel like, well, maybe that makes sense. sense because like the one proton doesn't need to find anything else or bind up with anything else. And so maybe just like it's easiest to get one proton. And that's why you've got a lot of it. But that's not the answer at all, is it? No, that's actually exactly the answer, right? It's the simplest thing you can do with these particles that is stable. And so the critical thing to understand is like, well, where do any elements come from? You know, are they just like created during the Big Bang or the same level? How does this actually come together? How do you make elements from the sort of early universe cosmic suit. Where do they emerge? And so an understanding that story, you'll understand

very quickly why it basically almost all started as hydrogen. And so, you know, going way back to the very, very beginning before there was any atoms, any even corks, any elements at all, go back to like the pre-Big Bang, right? What was the universe at the very, very beginning? Well, there was some hot and dense state, something we don't know what it was really at all. We just know that it had a lot of energy and it was hot and dense. And a common misperception about the Big Bang is that it was already like a tiny dot of stuff, which then exploded out into the universe. But instead, the modern perception of the sort of pre-Big Bang early universe is that the

universe was already filled with stuff. It wasn't like mostly empty space with a tiny dot, which then exploded. It was filled with this hot, dense stuff, which then expanded and cooled rapidly. So the temperature is dropping as space is expanding. So you should think the Big Bang is sort of happening everywhere all of it. once, not from a tiny little dot. And this is why I worry about teaching my eight-year-old anything, because I swear when I was in high school, I watched a video where it like started as a dot and it exploded.

And you just blew my mind that it wasn't that. And that matter was everywhere. And now I feel like how many other things that I learned in high school are not the way we view things anymore. And anyway, you've blown my mind. Let's move on. There's a lot of misperception about that. And part of that is because the whole idea of the Bing Bang has evolved.

Now we think of Big Bang is sort of like the inflationary epic. We have some of the sort of like question mark, hot dense stuff, which then expanded very, very rapidly via cosmic inflation. And for those of you interested in more details on about exactly how that happened, what we do and don't know about that, check out our episode called, Did This Particle Create the Big Bang? Which goes into detail about some theories about what might have caused that. Anyway, you have this hot, dense question mark stuff. And then it gets less hot and less dense as things cool, right?

Now, we talk a lot on the podcast about what space is, and we say that space is filled with quantum fields. Or you have a unit of space that has quantum fields in it, like a fields for the electron and a field for the cork and a field for the photons, right? And particles are just like ripples in those fields. Now, you go back to the very, very early universe, everything was so hot and so dense and so filled with energy that it doesn't even really make sense to talk about particles yet. It's like looking at the ocean and asking, like, are there any drops in the ocean? You say, like, no, it's just sort of like filled with water. In the same way, these quantum fields were so energized because everything was so hot and dense that the concept of a particle, like a little localized packet of energy moving through the

universe, doesn't really make sense, just like the wrong phase of the universe. And it wasn't until a little bit later, after like 10 to the minus 32 seconds, that things cool down enough that you could say, here's a particle. There's a particle. There's a particle. So that's when, like, quarks and gluons and photons and dark matter all emerged from this early universe question mark stuff. So the thing that triggered that then was cooling. So first you have everything mixed up and they start separating when it's cooling. And the cooling started just because time had passed and things cool with time.

Is that right? Or did something trigger the movement from homogenous whatever to, like, like specific things. It's the expansion, that's the key. So space is expanding. Inflation is pulling space apart. And the same process is happening right now. The universe is expanding.

Currently, we call it dark energy where space is making more space. So between the atoms in your body, in between the Earth and the sun and between our galaxy and other galaxies, space is producing new chunks of space. So distances between stuff is increasing. We don't understand why it's doing that or how it's doing that. But in the very early universe, a very similar process happened, much more dramatic and much faster.

And so this expansion then cools everything down. So the overall arc of history of the universe is start very hot and dense and then cool and expand and become less dense and more dilute. And as that happens, we sort of like move through different temperature regions. We get different sort of effects, you know, the same way like you have a gas and then a liquid and a solid. We have different phases of matter. We had different phases of sort of the physical laws of the universe when it made sense

to talk about the universe in different ways. So only when things cooled down enough, could we even like talk about particles as phenomena in quantum fields. So that went on for like 10 to the minus 12 seconds, and then things kept cooling. And the Higgs field, this really weird field that interacts with the particles

and gives the mass, it cooled down and sort of got stuck on a shelf. We talked about this in several episodes, how the Higgs field is very weird because it doesn't relax down as much as other fields. It got sort of stuck in a high potential and it has a lot of energy stored in it. And that's what gives a lot of particles mass.

We have a bunch of episodes on the Higgs boson if you want to learn more details about that. So here, the particles now get mass. So you have the quarks and the electrons. They used to have no mass. Now they do have mass. So the universe still has no protons in it. But now it has like quarks and electrons and gluons

in this big hot suit called a cork gluon plasma. And we also have a whole episode about what that is and how people make it at the Large Hedron Collison. either to study the early universe. So saying, you know, this happened at 10 to the negative 32 seconds and this other thing happened at 10 to the negative 12 seconds, like those are really short time periods, right? To the negative something means that many zeros after the decimal, right? So how do we figure out down to that level of precision?

Is that too off course to be asking that question? No, it's a great question. How well do we know these numbers? We don't know them very well at all. All of these come out of sort of our models for what we think happened. And there's huge question marks here. We could be off by, you know, big factors. So this is just sort of the current understanding.

And so we should put, like, big uncertainties on these numbers for sure. It couldn't have taken, like, a million years because what happened in the very early universe crystallized very quickly and it has long-term impacts on the rest of the universe, as we'll see. So we're pretty sure that this stuff happened very, very quickly, though the specific numbers are a little fuzzy. All right. So in, like, the blink of an eye, we've got quarks, but not yet protons.

Exactly. And so it's too hot for protons to form. Like there's just too much energy. Because what is a proton? You have three quarks and they're bound together by the gluons. But protons can get broken up, right? If you smash them together, you put enough energy into your collider. You can break them up. If you heat up the whole universe, then protons sort of melt into their constituents, right? And so what you need to do to make protons form is you need the universe to cool down even further. So then like 10 to the minus six seconds, then protons formed. The universe, the universe, was now too cold for quarks and gluons to just like fly around in this plasma. And so that cooled down. And then you got hadrons. You got protons. You got protons. And that's basically hydrogen, right? Remember that protons are hydrogen.

Astronomers don't really care if there's an electron on it or not. If there's a proton there, they call that hydrogen. So that was the birth of hydrogen. 10 to the minus six seconds into the universe, hydrogen was born. So does that mean that hydrogen is also the first? first element that was ever made or just the most abundant that was made at this point. I think both of those things are true. Hydrogen was the first element made and the most abundant. And in the next few seconds, you'll see that a little bit of other stuff was made in this sort of like

ending days of the Big Bang. But basically, it just formed huge amounts of hydrogen. That also means that all the hydrogen in the universe is super duper old. It's been around, except for the first 10 to the minus six seconds of the universe, it's been here. All the hydrogen. hydrogen that's in the atmosphere or in the sun or in the stars, it's as old as the universe except for 10 to the minus six seconds. So we're all old souls to some degree. We are all old souls. So that hydrogen has been hanging out for a long time. And it spent like 380,000 years before it found its electrons before the universe cooled even further to make neutral hydrogen gas. So it's been neutral hydrogen for very, very, very long time. But it's been technically hydrogen since the very

beginning. I guess it took so long to get the electrons because you needed just a whole lot more cooling before the electrons came around? Yeah, things were still too hot. So electrons had too much energy to get trapped by the protons. So electrons and protons were flying around near each other, but they were just moving too fast for the bonds to form, for them to pull into each other and form hydrogen. So you just wait for the universe to keep cooling until like gelled into neutral hydrogen. Well, speaking of cooling, the audience is going to have to cool their heels for a little while because it's Time for a break. December 29th,

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In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season. of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious

well wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot he doesn't think it's a problem but i don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it?

Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweeten. Monica Patton. Elaine Welterah. I'm Jessica Voss. And that's when I was like, I got to go.

I don't know how, but that kicked off the pivot of how to make the transition. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Every episode gets real about the why behind these changes and gives you the inspiration and maybe the push to make your next pivot. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't write songs. God write songs. I take dictation. I didn't even know you've been a pastor for over 10 years. I think culture is any space that you live in that, On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop.

This is like watching Michael Jackson talk about Thurley before it happened. Was there a particular moment where you realize just how instrumental music culture was to shaping all of our global ecosystem? I was eight years old, and the Motown 25 special came on. And all the great Motown artists, Marvin, Stevie Wonder, Temptations, Diana Raw. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. about hydrogen already, which is the most abundant and the earliest formed element.

So who takes the number two spot? So number two, no surprise, is helium, right? Helium is element number two. It's made out of two protons in the nucleus with two electrons going around it. And there's usually also some number of neutrons in there. And helium is 7.1% of the universe by atoms. So if you just like lined up all the atoms in the universe, in the universe and counted them, helium would be about 7.1%. And remember that hydrogen is 92%. So already in hydrogen and helium together,

you have 99.1% of all the atoms in the universe. Everything else is now less than 1% of the stuff in the universe. Wow. Is it possible that there's some universe out there where there's more helium than hydrogen and everybody's got a squeaky voice? Or you just have to always have hydrogen first? I love thinking about that universe.

And I imagine for a moment, maybe I would try to do an Alvin chipmunk voice to answer your question. And then I realized I just couldn't do it. But it's a good question because, you know, where did that helium come from? It came from that primordial hydrogen. And the sort of ending days of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath formed that helium. And so we'll learn about exactly how that happened. But it's hard to imagine converting a majority of the hydrogen into helium in this early universe fusion process. But it might be possible.

You'd have to tweak some of the laws of physics. to make that happen. A worthwhile endeavor, no doubt. And you know, what's funny about these elements is that astrophysicists think about hydrogen and helium is basically most of the universe and everything else is the leftovers, which they call metals. You know, chemists, when they talk about metals, they talk very specifically about part of the periodic table that has, you know, high conductivity and is shiny, for example.

That kind of things that like you and I think of as a metal. We don't think like oxygen as a metal. We don't think of what else cells is like breathing. metal gas. But to astronomers, it's hydrogen, helium, and metals. Why would they do that? Is it just because it's a very different process? And so they want to categorize it as something else? Yeah, as we'll see, basically everything else is made after the Big Bang inside stars. And they like to think of stars as creating metals. And so for them, it's just a totally different categorization. I think also it's just because hydrogen and helium are the big players. So they want like a name for everything else. And like we

often do in physics, they took a name which exists and means something else and they gave it a new confusing definition. Find that very frustrating about y'all. So let's continue with the history of the universe to understand how other stuff was made. So we're like 10 to the minus six seconds into the universe. We have protons. We have neutrons. But everything is flying around really, really hot. And we also have a lot of antimatter. We think that in the very early universe, we created matter, but we also created antimatter. So that means antiprotons and anti-electrons. And we imagine that the Big Bang created this stuff in equal numbers.

That when this like pre-matter energy cooled down to create particles, it created all the particles, basically in equal numbers. And so we think that antimatter was created at the same rate as matter. So then you had like big flashes of light because what happens when matter hits anti-matter is it annihilates. You have an electron hit an antimatter. anti-electron, also called a positron, you get a photon. And so huge amounts of matter and antimatter disappeared very quickly, and a lot of photons were made. And so after about 10 seconds of living it out in a crazy particle party, the universe then became dominated by photons from

matter, anti-matter annihilation. But if you're wearing the star screen that you and I started selling a couple weeks ago, you'll be okay. But so I'm trying to like match up the vision in my head from when I was in high school. So in that case, the light in like the video that I'm remembering was all in one center location and then spread out. But here, like the photons being made, it would be like everything would be lighting up at once, right? It wouldn't be in one central location. It's all over the place. That's right. Because we think the Big Bang happened everywhere, it also means there's no center to the universe. Not like this stuff all happens somewhere and is flying out from there. It happened everywhere. It happened here. You are right now at the place where the

Big Bang happened, literally, right? It happened everywhere all at once. And so the whole universe was filled with matter and antimatter, which then annihilated very rapidly and then you have the universe with enormous amounts of high-energy photons flying around. So we call this the radiation-dominated epoch of the universe when most of the energy was in photons and not in like things we call matter. But there were small amounts of matter that were left over.

For reasons, we still don't understand there are mysterious processes that either created more matter than antimatter or. preferably converted some of the antimatter to matter. So there's a little bit of an imbalance and some matter was left over. So you end up with a universe with lots of photons and a little bit of protons, electrons, and neutrons left over. All right. So then how do we get from all of those photons to having mercury?

I love this phrase, mergering. It makes it sound like a legal thing. Like the protons and the lawyers got together and they're like, let's talk about the future of these particles. Well, I said, I said mercury, but I prefer what you said. What you said is way more interesting. So we're going with that. That's what I said.

I made up a great new word. Right. You made up particle merging. And so what happened next is that you have a universe basically filled with hydrogen. And this hydrogen also was not just pure proton plus electron. A lot of them had a neutron tagging along. So we call this douterium, where do means like two. So you have two nucleons in there.

A proton and a neutron surrounded by an electron. And the universe was cool enough to form that, but still hot enough for fusion. So fusion is when you take two pieces of hydrogen, two protons essentially, even though they repel each other electrically because they're both positively charged, you squeeze them together, then you can form helium. And so this happens in the heart of stars all the time. And we're trying to make it happen here on Earth in fusion reactors that can release energy. But it requires very high temperatures and very high densities.

But for a few minutes after the Big Bang, these conditions existed. So three minutes after this unknown state expanded very, very rapidly, the conditions were perfect for hydrogen fusion into helium. And that's where most of the helium in the universe was made after three minutes. So this is my monthly moment of existential dread. All of this talk about heating and cooling. Does that mean that like if things had cooled down much faster, none of this stuff would have happened

and like there's you know we're talking about you know 10 to the negative 32 seconds like these tiny little time scales if the timing had been a little bit different might we have never gotten the photons to join together or whatever

Well if things had happened much faster that we wouldn't have had as much time to make helium so we'd have more hydrogen in the universe but hydrogen is sort of the basic most stable thing is sort of the inevitable end point if you take the universe and you cool it down you're going to end up with hydrogen

because it's got to fall into up quarks and down quarks and electrons and as the universe cools, those things are going to form stable objects. But it does determine how much helium you get. So if you had like less time in that hot phase when it was perfect to make helium, you'd get less helium. Also the density of the universe controls like how much helium you get and also how much lithium you get. We'll talk about that in a moment. But in this early phase, you also sometimes were able to fuse things together to get lithium, right, to get the next element. But the very, but the very ratio of hydrogen and helium and lithium that you get is very, very sensitive to the temperature and to the cork density. So by understanding like how much helium and hydrogen and lithium was made

in the early universe, we can tell what the cork density was before that. We know, for example, if you had higher cork density, you would have gotten a different distribution. You would have gotten more helium and more lithium. If it was lower cork density, you would have gotten less helium and less lithium. So what that means is that we can account for the corks. We can say, look out into the universe and we see the ratio of hydrogen and helium and lithium in the early universe, that tells us about the cork density very early on. And that's how we know that dark matter is not made of corks because we can account for all those corks. We say we know how many quarks were made very, very early on. Those all ended up in hydrogen, helium, and lithium. Therefore, the dark matter

that's out there can't be made out of corks. It's an important part of the argument for why we think dark matter is not made of corks, is not atomic matter at all. are very clever apes. It's really incredible. And you know, the folks who think about, well, maybe dark matter is this other thing or maybe dark matter is a misunderstanding of gravity, this is an important argument for why dark matter is matter and why it's not just like dark heavy rocks floating out in space that we haven't observed yet. So it's really interesting how much you learn about the universe just by understanding like where these elements were crystallized and how that process happened.

That's awesome. We've talked about how you make helium. Are there other ways to make helium? Or did all of it come from this moment? So helium is produced in the early universe in the Big Bang, but also much later, right? Like our sun is a helium factory. Because this process we talked about where hydrogen comes together to make helium, that's exactly what's happening inside our star. That's why it's like hot right now outside, because the energy from hydrogen burning inside the star is producing helium. You have this complicated multi-step process. We actually need like two hydrogen nuclei to come together to make deuterium. So you have two protons come together and one of them actually converts into a neutron, which then becomes an element of deuterium.

They have like another hydrogen comes in and you make helium three and then those helium three merged together and you end up with helium four. So it's a complicated multi-step process. But this is what we call hydrogen burning and it produces most of the energy and the cores of most of the stars out there. So when you look out in the night sky and you see all that, twinkling. Mostly you're observing hydrogen being turned into helium. Is that fusion or is fusion slightly different than what you just described? That is exactly fusion that powers the stars. But you know, there's a long gap here. We're talking about helium made primordially during the Big Bang the first three minutes of the universe. But there were hundreds of millions of years before the

universe got to a place where we created those conditions in the hearts of stars to make more helium because the universe was just vast clouds of hydrogen for a long, long time. We called these the dark ages of the universe before gravity pulled those clouds together and created the conditions for stars so it could fuse this hydrogen together to make more helium. So the universe has been working on that for 14 billion years or so, and it still hasn't really changed the balance. You know, most of the stuff out there is still just hydrogen. Wow.

Helium doesn't usually go back to hydrogen, right? So you still end up with that balance despite constantly turning hydrogen into helium? Exactly. We've been working on it for a long time, but it's a long process and there's so much hydrogen out there that it's going to take a long time before we burn through it. We have an episode about like how many generations of stars there will be. And we think the universe has like trillions of years of fuel potentially to burn stars. All right. So I can tell my kids about that because I won't scare them too much. All right. We've gotten hydrogen and helium, which were the most common guesses from the audience. Let's take a break and then let's hear about who the runner up is. Who's in third place.

December 29, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impacted. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism.

Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice. system on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him?

Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweeten. Monica Patton.

Elaine Welteroth. I'm Jessica Voss. And that's when I was like, I got to go. I don't know how, but that kicked off the pivot of how to make the transition. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Every episode gets real about the why behind these changes and gives you the inspiration and maybe the push to make your next pivot. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots, now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't write songs. God write songs. I take dictation.

I didn't even know you've been a pastor for over 10 years. I think culture is any space that you live in that develops you. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down. with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. This is like watching Michael Jackson talk about thoroughly before it happened. Was there a particular moment where you realize just how instrumental music culture was to shaping all of our global ecosystem?

I was eight years old, and the Motown 25 special came on. and all the great Motown artists, Marvin, Stevie Wonder, Temptations, Diana Raw. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so the universe is mostly hydrogen. Second place way far behind is helium. Who's coming in third? You might think by extrapolation that number three would be the element with three protons in it,

that you could like take helium and hydrogen infuse them together to make lithium, which has three protons. But actually lithium is very, very rare in the universe. There are only trace amounts of lithium. Number three is actually oxygen. Oxygen is the third most common element in the universe. So we'll get to that in a minute. But let's talk about lithium and like, why is it?

It's so weird. It turns out that lithium is really unstable. And so they are produced in nuclear fusion, but only very briefly because they basically fall apart very rapidly. So unlike helium or other stuff, when you make lithium, it doesn't last very long. It just sort of like falls back apart. And oxygen is more stable? Mm-hmm.

Oxygen is much more stable. So you might be wondering, like, what makes something stable or not stable? What are we talking about here? Remember that we're talking about gluing protons and neutrons together, which is complicated. It's well beyond the like chemistry of pluses and minuses. Everything inside the nucleus is either positively charged or neutral. So what's sticking them together anyway? Why can you stick two protons together to make helium or even heavier stuff?

The answer is the strong nuclear force. The gluons that are inside these protons and neutrons can also talk to each other. So when you get two protons close enough to each other, the gluons that are inside them can sort of grab onto each other and overcome their electrostatic repulsion. And that's very complicated, and it's good in some configurations, but not in others, which is what makes some elements stable and other elements not. And so you tend to form these things in shells, just like we have shells of electrons. Inside the nucleus, we think there are shells of protons and neutrons that arrange themselves in various configurations. Some of those configurations are like very nicely packed, like a Roman arch that's stable. And other configurations are very unstable.

And lithium turns out to be like a very unstable configuration. So this is another thing that I feel like I don't remember learning when I was in high school or college. Is this another, like, new thing or, like, was I sick on the wrong day? I don't know how often you paid attention in college, but this is something we've been working on for a few decades, understanding, like, the nuclear shell model. Probably not very often taught in high school, but the whole concept that some of these things are more stable than others should be familiar. Yeah, okay, that's familiar. Okay, so sets of three are just not very stable, and that's why we don't have lithium around for a long time. Yeah, lithium in general is just not very stable.

Other elements are much more stable. Like you get up to carbon, carbon is stable. And that has six, right? And so it's not as simple as like sets of three. Some of these things, the way they are arranged, are stable and some of them are not. And it's not easy to calculate either. It's not like you can just sit down with a couple of equations and figure this stuff out because a strong force is very strong and very nasty and very hard to do any calculations with.

But because lithium and the next element, beryllium are so unstable, basically nothing else was made in the Big Bang. Big Bang is like massive amounts of hydrogen, a little bit of helium, tiny, tiny bits of lithium and nothing else. Because lithium is sort of like a barrier. You can't really get past lithium in the early universe. And so you couldn't really make anything else. That's why the Big Bang didn't make like uranium or plutonium because one of the stepping stones to get there was too unstable to last. And so lithium is not a metal though because it didn't stick around. Astronomers would call lithium a metal for sure because there are some amounts of it in the universe but it's very, very rare. The same is true for beryllium, which is the next element.

It exists in the universe, but it wasn't made in the Big Bang. It's too heavy. And some of it is made inside stars, right? If you fuse two helium atoms together, sometimes you get beryllium, but a lot of it is also very unstable. And so some isotopes of it don't last very long. A lot of it falls apart. Actually, most of the beryllium in the universe was not made inside stars at all. Most of the beryllium in the universe was made by taking oxygen, which is everywhere, and exists between stars and then hitting it with a cosmic ray. So you have, for example, stars are giving out their stellar wind, which is like streams of particles, protons, electrons, all sorts of stuff. So we call these things

cosmic rays, just high energy particles flying through the universe. If one of them hits an oxygen atom, it can knock off some of the protons inside the oxygen atom. So this is like fission, right? Not fusion, we're taking lighter elements and using them to build heavier stuff. This is taking heavier elements and break them apart. It's like what happens in fission reactors with uranium. You break uranium down into lighter elements. In the interstellar medium, we think they're vast clouds of oxygen. Sometimes a proton hits one and makes beryllium. So beryllium is actually made by cosmic rays between stars. When oxygen gets hit by a cosmic ray does it always make beryllium or does it sometimes make other things depending on like

how it got hit it doesn't always make beryllium sometimes it just bounce off each other but sometimes a high enough energy proton just the right way will crack open the oxygen and break it up into pieces and that's mostly how beryllium was made in the universe but it'll like never break oxygen into like three heliums for example you can do that also yeah you can get lots of different stuff when you smash these particles together so you mentioned that carbon is the next thing that we have the most of of where is the carbon coming from? So carbon was not made in the very early universe because it's kind of tricky to make. Carbon requires this like three-step dance.

Carbon requires six protons, right? You can't just fuse lithium together because lithium is unstable. You can't just like take two lithium atoms and stick them together because there just isn't enough lithium around. So what you need to do instead of fusing two lithiums together is you need to fuse three heliums together. So you need six protons, two from each of three different. different helium atoms. And now in the very early universe, we made helium and that helium bounced off each other, but it's very hard to get like three heliums together. It's much more complicated than getting two heliums together. And so this is a complicated process. We have two helium come together to make beryllium, which is also really unstable. But before the beryllium falls apart, you need that third helium to come in to swoop in and turn it into carbon. So like if you get that third one in place just in time, this is called the three alpha.

process, then you can make it over the unstable skipping stone of beryllium and get to carbon. And where is this happening? Is this in the sun or is this happening out where you get the oxygen becoming beryllium? So this happens inside of stars, but it's not easy for it to happen, right? In order for this to happen, the star has to be like really big and really hot so we can burn helium. And it's not just that it has to be hot, it has to be dense. So you have like enough helium around so that one of these helium atoms hits the beryllium before it breaks apart. But this is really fascinating process because a lot of stars are not hot enough to burn helium for most of their lives, like our star, for example. Helium, when you produce it in our star, just falls to the center of the

star and accumulates at the core there, kind of inert for a long, long time. Our star is not hot enough to burn the helium. But it will be for a very brief moment near the end of its life. When enough of that helium accumulates, so there's enough gravitational pressure, all of a sudden it's going to cross this threshold and it's going to burn all of that helium really quickly into carbon. It's called a helium flash. And for a few seconds, the sun will produce 100 billion times as much energy as it normally does. So that means that the carbon on Earth didn't come from our sun because our sun couldn't make it yet. So the carbon on Earth came from other suns? Is that right? Exactly. Because we're like three generations of suns in the universe. So most of the carbon,

that we have here on Earth was formed during one of these helium burning events inside another star, which burned for billions of years, and then died and exploded and spread out its seeds into the universe. The universe started out as almost all hydrogen and a little bit of helium, so those first few stars in their solar systems were almost all just hydrogen, but the next generation were more metallic, as astronomers say, and the next generation are even more metallic. So our solar system is part of the third generation, we think, and so we have lots of left over bits that were produced inside other stars. So this is what you were talking about earlier.

We are all star stuff. The carbon that's inside our body was made by fusing helium inside other stars. But so then like the moon doesn't have like any carbon, right? So it's kind of the carbon sort of the star explodes and the carbon goes out there. And then it's sort of like patchily distributed throughout the universe. Is that fair to say? Yeah, exactly. Because the earth doesn't have the same distribution of stuff as the whole universe does.

right? Like when the solar system formed, most of the hydrogen that went into forming the solar system went to Jupiter and the sun. We got very, very little hydrogen. We got a lot of the heavier stuff because we had like a heavy rocky sea that gathered together some of the heavier stuff. So the Earth is not a representative sample of the universe at all, but the solar system as a whole is more representative. Like I say, usually talking to you gives me like existential dread, but I'm feeling pretty uplifted right now that all of these different things that we've talked about have all so far gone in the direction of creating the Earth.

That seems like a pretty low probability thing. All right, so moving past carbon, tell me about some of the heavier stuff. And so from there, we need heavier, hotter stars that are capable of burning helium and then capable of like burning carbon. So if you have the right conditions, if you have enough pressure and enough temperature

and enough density, you can fuse carbon together. This is called carbon burning. And then it's just stepping your way up the periodic table. You can get all the way up to iron. You can fuse things up to iron and the process releases energy. When we talk about fusion, we like smush two nuclei together. We get a heavier nucleus plus energy. That's why stars glow and continue to burn because the energy that's produced from the fusion keeps the fusion going.

But after iron, when you try to fuse iron together with other stuff, it eats energy. Like the weird nuclear structure that's keeping these things together, it starts to need energy to form these other heavier elements. So you want to make like lead and uranium inside your star, you can do it, but it cools the star down. So it contributes to killing the star rather than keeping it burning. And so inside the star, you can make like things up to about iron with fusion, but afterwards, the process slows down really rapidly because it's a cooling process instead of a heating process. But you need to get super hot to make iron, right? So you get super hot, you start making iron and then that cools you down. Exactly.

And only the biggest, most massive stars can even make. make iron. Like our sun will never make iron. It'll fuse helium at its core and it'll make some carbon in its last few gasps, but it'll never make anything heavier than that. To get iron, you need like much more massive stars. And then to get heavier than iron, you might wonder like, well, where does that come from? How's that possible if you can't use fusion? There's a few other processes to make that stuff. Like one thing you can do is called neutron capture. So you have some heavy thing floating around a star. You also have a bunch of neutrons floating around. Sometimes instead of like actual fusion where you add protons to an element, you can add a neutron. Take, for example,

gold, which has weight 197. If it absorbs a neutron, it's still gold, but now it's 198. And gold 198 is unstable. It tends to beta decay so that neutron turns into a proton, and now it's mercury. And so the gold is taken like a two-step dance of absorbing a neutron, flipping it into a proton, and now it's taken one step up the periodic table. Wow, you go from something you really want, is something you really don't so much want. Hey, no judgment here. You know, some people like mercury, not in their pastries. You know, I don't see fancy mercury flakes on pastries as much as I see fancy gold foil.

That's true. Yeah, I don't want any mercury flakes in my liquor either or my shampoo. Let's keep it out of our stuff. Exactly. And the heavier stuff has also made, we think, at the last moments of a star. Sometimes when a star is collapsing, it can produce the conditions necessary to make the heavier elements that it couldn't otherwise normally few. Like if you don't have the conditions necessary to make heavier stuff, well, at the last few moments of a star's life, when it undergoes gravitational collapse, it creates intense temperature, intense pressure, intense density. And in these last moments, you can do what's called supernova nucleosynthesis, where it makes some of these heavier elements.

Gold and europium and other kinds of things can be formed in those moments by supernova. Is that something that we've been able to observe, like a supernova happening in these things sort of being like ejected based on? on their like spectral characteristics or something. Even we find little crystals of it buried in the ocean. What? Yeah, specific conditions for making these things are quite unique. And they make these little crystal nodules, which we have found like sprayed out through the universe

and dug out like from the bottom of the ocean. We have a whole episode about supernova and how people figure this out. And one thing they discovered when they understood this is that it didn't seem to be explaining everything. Like supernova can make some of these heavier elements, but it can't explain all of it. Like there needed to be another process. There weren't enough supernovas to make all the gold we see in the universe, for example. So there's a

completely different way of making these heavier elements sometimes. And that's by combining neutron stars. So neutron stars like the leftover remnant of a really, really heavy star. Maybe they had like a supernova and it collapsed and it leaves this really hot, crazy core with strange nuclear matter. And it's not dense enough to form a black holes, just sort of sits there hot and glowing in the x-rays. But sometimes there are two of them, and the two are close enough to each other, they'll spiral in and eventually combine and produce like gravitational waves. But in that moment, they also produce really heavy elements. So neutron star collisions can make like gold and europium.

You know, we think that, for example, in one of these collisions, you can make like five earth masses of gold. That's where we should be doing space mining. How do we get out there? I think the conditions are a little treacherous, but exactly. It's incredible to think that these fairly rare and dramatic and cataclysmic events are responsible for making so many of the interesting atoms that make our universe fun and unique and make like technology possible. So many of those elements are important for like batteries here on Earth. And we take advantage of their weird properties for all sorts of like chemical processes.

And none of that would be possible if we didn't have dramatic and cataclyclose. Lismic destructive events out there in the universe weirdly producing these things, right? Yeah, you know, I know I say this every week, but every week I am amazed at the things that physicists have learned about the universe and figured out that just like, it blows my mind that we managed to figure all these details out. Yeah. I think one more thing that people should understand about these elements is that if you look at like the frequency of the elements in the universe, you can tell yourself a story.

It like starts out with hydrogen and helium that it falls pretty quickly. And there's a couple gaps there, like lithium and beryllium and boron are just unstable so there aren't very many of them and the heavier elements are less likely. But there's also a really weird zigzag pattern. Like the even elements are more common than the odd. You know, so like 10 is more common than 11 and 40 is more common than 41 and 78 is more common than 79. And that's weird.

And that's another consequence of this nuclear shell model we were talking about earlier, how having like a certain number of protons and neutrons to, fit together into the right pattern makes you more stable. And so this is called the auto-harkens rule that argues that elements with odd atomic numbers have one unpaired proton and so are more likely to capture another one increasing their atomic number. And so really in the end, everything that we see in the universe, all these elements come from the basic rules of the protons and neutrons, like how you're allowed to click them together, what they like to do, what conditions you need to make them do various things.

It really does tell you just by looking at the distribution of the number of elements in the universe, sort of what's allowed out there and our history, like how we've been cooking the universe so far. Is this everything from computer chips to chibati? All right, so spread that on your fraccia and have it for lunch. All right, so thanks everybody for coming along with us on this cosmic culinary journey of creation as we talk about what's out there in the universe, how it's made, and where it all came from. And I hope that gave you an appetite. I'm hungry. Let's go eat.

Try to avoid the mercury lace dishes. I'll pass that note on to Zach. And thanks everybody for joining us. Tune in next time. Thanks. Bye. Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe

is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeart Radio, visit the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage,

kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the T.W. UA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out Soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and

incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast. Take a listen. Sue and I were, like, riding the lime bikes the other day, and we're like, we're like, people ride bikes because it's fun. We got more incredible guests like Megan in store, plus news of the day and more. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. This is an IHeart podcast.