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Surely the three most common elements (by any measure) are hydrogen, helium and lithium?
by frutiger 7y ago
Surely 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."