Awesome topic Muphy! i did some research on Methane Clathrates a few years back when said sources suspected that might be the cause of the Bermuda Triangle. I found it highly probable as both buoyancy and the density of air are affected by methane release. I had a question and correct me if im wrong, but dont stars create elements all the way up to lithium in their process of burning out and dying?
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
Hi @csusbgeochem1, you worked on Gas Hydrates! so you must be familiar with the clathrate structure! Cool, not many people are :-).
Well all the periodic table comes from stars. Hydrogene, Helium and traces of Lithium were formed during the primordial nucleosynthesis (The synthesis of the first atoms after the big bang).
That provided the material to make up stars. Depending on their mass, these stars will create the other elements. If they are very small, up to Helium, for small to medium sized like the sun, up to oxygen, and for bigger ones, those destined to explode in supernovas, up to Iron.
At the end of their lives, the bigger stars will produce all the other elements during a supernovae phase. In the future, I'll probably write a much more detailed post about this fascinating phenomena describing the various fusion reactions... These are not always simple and straight forward, but nature always finds its own ways :-)