Origin of the chemical elements

The relative abundances of the chemical elements provide significant clues regarding their origin. Earth’s crust has been affected severely by erosion, fractionation, and other geologic events, so that its present varied composition offers few clues as to its early stages. The composition of the matter from which the solar system formed is deduced from that of stony meteorites called chondrites and from the composition of the Sun’s atmosphere, supplemented by data acquired from spectral observations of hot stars and gaseous nebulas. The table lists the most abundant chemical elements; it represents an average pertaining to all cosmic objects in general.

The most obvious feature is that the light elements tend to be more abundant than the heavier ones. That is to say, when abundance is plotted against atomic mass, the resulting graph shows a decline with increasing atomic mass up to an atomic mass value of about 100. Thereafter the abundance is more nearly constant. Furthermore, the decline is not smooth. Among the lighter elements, those of even atomic number tend to be more abundant, and those with an atomic number divisible by four are especially favoured. The abundances of lithium, beryllium, and boron are rare compared with those of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. There is a pronounced abundance peak for iron and a relatively high peak for lead, the most stable of the heavy elements.

The overwhelming preponderance of hydrogen suggests that all the nuclei were built from this simplest element, a hypothesis first proposed many years ago and widely accepted for a time. According to this now-defunct idea, all matter was initially compressed into one huge ball of neutrons. As the universe began to expand, its density decreased and the neutrons decayed into protons and electrons. The protons then captured neutrons (see neutron capture), one after another, underwent beta decay (ejection of electrons), and synthesized the heavy elements. A major difficulty with this hypothesis, among various other problems, is that atomic masses 5 and 8 are unstable, and there is no known way to build heavier nuclei by successive neutron capture.

A large body of evidence now supports the idea that only the nuclei of hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of other light nuclei such as lithium, beryllium, and boron, were produced in the aftermath of the big bang, the hot explosion from which the universe is thought to have emerged, whereas the heavier nuclei were, and continue to be, produced in stars. The majority of them, however, are fashioned only in the most massive stars and some only for a short period of time after supernova explosions (see below Evolution of high-mass stars).

The splitting in the spectral sequence among the cooler stars can be understood in terms of composition differences. The M-type stars appear to have a normal (i.e., solar) makeup, with oxygen more abundant than carbon and the zirconium group of elements much less abundant than the titanium group. The R-type and N-type stars often contain more carbon than oxygen, whereas the S-type stars appear to have an enhanced content of zirconium as compared with titanium. Other abundance anomalies are found in a peculiar class of higher temperature stars, called Wolf-Rayet (or W) stars, in which objects containing predominantly helium, carbon, and oxygen are distinguished from those containing helium and nitrogen, some carbon, and little observed oxygen. Significantly, all these abundance anomalies are found in stars thought to be well advanced in their evolutionary development. No main-sequence dwarfs display such effects.

A most critical observation is the detection of the unstable element technetium in the S-type stars. This element has been produced synthetically in nuclear laboratories on Earth, and its longest-lived isotope, technetium-99, is known to have a half-life of 200,000 years. The implication is that this element must have been produced within the past few hundred thousand years in the stars where it has been observed, suggesting furthermore that this nucleosynthetic process is at work in at least some stars today. This heavy element upwells from a star’s core (where it is produced) to the surface (near where it is observed) in a phase called the third dredge-up, when material in deep helium-burning layers is brought to the surface through convection.

Researchers have been able to demonstrate how elements might be created in stars by nuclear processes occurring at very high temperatures and densities. No one mechanism can account for all the elements; rather, several distinct processes occurring at different epochs during the late evolution of a star have been proposed.

After hydrogen, helium is the most abundant element. Most of it was probably produced in the initial big bang. Furthermore, as described earlier, helium is the normal ash of hydrogen consumption, and in the dense cores of highly evolved stars, helium itself is consumed to form, successively, carbon-12, oxygen-16, neon-20, and magnesium-24. By this time in the core of a sufficiently massive star, the temperature has reached some 700 million K. Under these conditions, particles such as protons, neutrons, and helium-4 nuclei also can interact with the newly created nuclei to produce a variety of other elements such as fluorine and sodium. Because these “uneven” elements are produced in lesser quantities than those divisible by four, both the peaks and troughs in the curve of cosmic abundances can be explained.

As the stellar core continues to shrink and the central temperature and density are forced even higher, a fundamental difficulty is soon reached. A temperature of roughly one billion K is sufficient to create silicon (silicon-28) by the usual method of helium capture. This temperature, however, is also high enough to begin to break apart silicon as well as some of the other newly synthesized nuclei. A “semi-equilibrium” is set up in the star’s core—a balance of sorts between the production and destruction (photodisintegration) of silicon. Ironically, though destructive, this situation is suitable for the production of even heavier nuclei up to and including iron (iron-56), again through the successive capture of helium nuclei.