[meteorite-list] Where all the iron and nickle came from...?

From: Jerry Flaherty <grf2_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:38:06 -0400
Message-ID: <294EB2D3B0A047A5805FF6852895AF77_at_ASUS>

I love those lyrics I am those lyrics we are those lyrics
Scientist and poet are these terms self contradictory?
I love science [what little I can understand of it]
yet deep in my "soul" I yearn to "know" more
The reality is overwhelming to my feeble mind
So I dabble in the "arts" to sooth a humbled heart
We are star dust
Yippee what a claim to fame
We are born
Deep in the heart of the stars
You got to love it!
Our mementos filed neatly and labeled for posterity
Bring us closer to that crux
Bring us to a List of like minded
Jerry Flaherty

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Sterling K. Webb" <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
Sent: Friday, September 18, 2009 12:15 PM
To: "Melanie Matthews" <spacewoman2775 at hotmail.com>;
<meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Where all the iron and nickle came from...?

> Hi, Mel, List,
>
> The recipe for a universe is simple. Start with
> a batch of hot particles. Let them cool until they
> combine into hydrogen atoms. As they cool, some
> will fuse and make some helium.
>
> Now you have a universe of 75% hydrogen and
> 25% helium gas. Boring. Let the gas gather by gravity
> into stars everywhere. More interesting. The big stars
> burn fast and combine atoms bigger and bigger until
> you have all the atoms up to iron, in just a few million
> years.
>
> Then the big ones explode, creating all the elements
> heavier than iron and spreading them as gas and dust
> in clouds through the universe in a few billion years.
> The gas and dust clump by gravity into new stars, the
> biggest of which will explode in a few million years all
> over again. (Some stars never learn).
>
> Before you know it, there's a mix of all elements
> everywhere, making new stars, exploding big stars
> right away. The small stars will live longer than the
> universe. The medium stars will live 5 to 15 billion
> years (like ours).
>
> We look out the window and it's still going on. We
> see the remnants of the exploded stars. We see the
> new stars forming. We see the young stars, the
> middle-aged stars, the old stars.
>
> The young universe had very little heavier elements.
> They increase as the universe ages. You can actually
> make a good rough calculation of the age of a universe
> by the amount of heavier elements you find. As the
> universe gets older, the amount of heavier elements
> increases.
>
> Iron is a particularly important element in this cycle.
> It's when a star works its way up to burning iron that
> it fails, collapses and goes boom! Iron is the heaviest
> element that can be cooked slowly in a star; all the
> heavier ones are created in the flash of the explosion.
>
> You see, it takes more energy to fuse iron than you
> get from the fusion. Instead of heating the star, it cools
> it. When the star cools, it suddenly collapses. The big
> whack that results is a supernova, when all the other
> elements are cooked up in an instant.
>
> Some (not all) believe that our star formed in a
> neighborhood where there had been one or more recent
> supernovae that enriched the raw materials in our star's
> mix of gas and dust. It's an argument, but the evidence
> seems to tilting in that direction. We keep finding traces
> of isotopes from a recipe of recent exploding stars.
>
> So, what do you get? Five billion years later, we
> get songs written especially for Woodstock that start:
> "We are stardust..."
>
>
> Sterling K. Webb
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Melanie Matthews" <spacewoman2775 at hotmail.com>
> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Friday, September 18, 2009 6:05 AM
> Subject: [meteorite-list] Where all the iron and nickle came from...?
>
>
>>
>> Hello list,
>> These metallic elements are so common in stony meteorites - as we know...
>> now, don't they originally form at the cores of stars, and the traces of
>> these metals that contained during the earliest days of the formation of
>> our Solar System, are the remnants of nearby dead stars that exploded
>> millions or billions of years before the Solar System started to emerge?
>>
>> Regards
>> - Mel
>>
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Received on Fri 18 Sep 2009 12:38:06 PM PDT