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For anyone confused as to why: We (not just people but life on Earth) are mostly made of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. Nitrogen was something of a bott
by rriepe 7y ago
For anyone confused as to why: We (not just people but life on Earth) are mostly made of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. Nitrogen was something of a bottleneck because it's so much less ubiquitous than the other three, which are three of the four most common elements in the universe.
- aaronblohowiak 7y agoless ubiquitous in a bio-available way. Nitrogen is most of the atmosphere.
- rriepe 7y agoI meant it in an "elements occurring in the universe" sort of way, but this is a great point too. If we could get at atmospheric nitrogen naturally, there'd be no bottleneck.
- frutiger 7y agoSurely the three most common elements (by any measure) are hydrogen, helium and lithium?
- rriepe 7y agoIt's complicated. Helium does make the list, but lithium doesn't. Carbon and oxygen are higher than you'd expect if you're just going by atomic weight.
- frutiger 7y agoI remember from my astrophysics course that Lithium was formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang. I would imagine that interstellar space is full of Hydrogen, Helium and Lithium. I can imagine that stable nuclei such as carbon or iron would form as a result of stellar fusion but I would be hard pressed to imagine that these outmass the more primordial elements. I would be interested to see references if you have any.
- rriepe 7y agoWikipedia has a good writeup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem... TL;DR: Stars burn it up.
- frutiger 7y agoThat table is for the milky way though, not the universe.
- rriepe 7y agoYeah but all the elemental matter in the universe is like three dust specks floating in a lecture hall. You can ask about the dust specks or the lecture hall interchangeably.
- frutiger 7y agoThis is a common misconception. Intergalactic space is filled with about half of the matter in the universe. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm–hot_intergalactic_medium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm–hot_intergalactic_mediu... As to your original point though, there doesn’t appear to be too many elements here apart from ionized hydrogen and hydrogen.
- rriepe 7y agoGreat point. I almost missed this. It really seems like there should be another separation in the article I linked, between "Universe" and "Milky Way."