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T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F T E X A S AT A U S T I N M c D O N A L D O B S E R VAT O R Y
 Chemical Unive
Most of the elements of the periodic table have their
origins in the cosmos, but there may be room for
some new ones made in the laboratory
1
H By Rebecca Johnson
3 4 5 6 7
Li Be B C N
11 12 13 14 15
Na Mg Al Si P
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
K Ca Sc Ti V Cr Mn Fe Co Ni Cu Zn Ga Ge As
37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
Rb Sr Y Zr Nb Mo Tc Ru Rh Pd Ag Cd In Sn Sb
55 56 57 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83
Cs Ba La Hf Ta W Re Os Ir Pt Au Hg Tl Pb Bi
87 88 89 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115
Fr Ra Ac Rf Db Sg Bh Hs Mt Ds Uuu Uub ? Uuq ? U

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69
Ce Pr Nd Pm Sm Eu Gd Tb Dy Ho Er Tm
90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101
Tim Jones, Adapted from ACS; STsci/nasa (background)

Th Pa U Np Pu Am Cm Bk Cf Es Fm Md

 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2005
 “T
he alchemists basically
erse had it right,” says Texas
astronomer Chris Sneden,
referring to the Middle-Ages conjurers
who labored in vain to turn base metals
into gold. To make the elements, “you
needed fire, and you needed to excite the
2
material, to make it hot and dense enough
He to change from one element to another.
8 9 10
O F Ne The trouble was, they couldn’t get it hot
16 17 18 enough and dense enough.”
S Cl Ar Such hot and dense conditions do exist
34 35 36
Se Br Kr in nature, though. All of the 115 or so
52 53 54 known chemical elements were created
Te I Xe
84 85 86 in the Big Bang that began the universe,
Po At Rn in the cores of stars, or in the supernova
116 117 118
Uuh ? Uuo explosions that herald the ends of massive
stars’ lives. Some of the heaviest elements,
70 71
however, were created most recently of all
Yb Lu
102 103 — in Earth-bound laboratories.
No Lr “Most beginning chemistry students
accept the periodic table as God-given,”
Sneden says. “The periodic table just didn’t
magically appear. It wasn’t one of the things
Moses brought down from the mountain.”
S ta r D at e 
 Previous page: Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev orga- call heavy elements, or “metals” — lithium
The periodic table over- nized the then-known elements into the first and everything heavier.
lies the Crab Nebula, modern periodic table in 1869. Mendeleev The amount of lithium created in the Big
the remains of a star arranged the elements by their atomic num- Bang has important implications for under-
10 times as massive as ber, which refers to how many protons are in standing the universe’s future — whether
the Sun that exploded the nucleus of one atom. Hydrogen, with one it will continue to expand, or ultimately
in 1054. The explosion proton, is first, and ununoctium, with 118, close on itself. That’s because the amount of
blew chemical elements currently is the last. The higher the number lithium made depends on the precise density
created inside the star of protons, and thus the atomic number, the of the universe during the Era of Nucleosyn-
into space, including heavier the element. thesis. Astronomers investigate this by mea-
hydrogen (orange), nitro-
Since Mendeleev’s time, scientists have suring the amount of lithium in very old stars.
gen (red), sulfur (pink),
been looking for more elements, filling in “It may be a holdover from the Big Bang,”
and oxygen (green).
blank spots in the table, and even claiming to Sneden says. Other studies — notably those
find some elements that were later disproved. involving the distances to certain classes of
But the most efficient element-builder of all is exploding stars, have shown that the universe
Mother Nature. will expand forever, and that its expansion
is speeding up. Studying lithium in old stars

T
he three lightest elements — hydrogen is an independent check on the conclusions
(atomic number one), helium (atomic from these and other studies.
number two), and lithium (atomic

I
number three) — were created in the f the first three elements were made in the
earliest moments of the uni- first three minutes, the rest didn’t come
Helium verse. In the Big Bang, along until about a billion years later, with
Carbon Sneden explains, the formation of the first stars and galaxies.
O x y gen “you begin with the That’s because the other elements were forged
N e on entire matter of in the universe’s chemical factories: the stars.
nesi the universe, in- Except for those created in the laboratory,
Mag um credibly dense every element heavier than lithium was creat-
Silicon and incredibly ed by a star. That includes every atom of oxy-
hot,” he says. gen that we breathe, every atom of calcium in
Iron “Something our bones and iron in our blood, every atom
Tim Jones

Core happens, and of gold in our jewelry. So without the finely

this material tuned processes of nuclear fusion, neither our
Calciu m starts to ex- planet nor its inhabitants would exist.
pand. And it Like the overall universe, stars are made
cools very rap- mostly of hydrogen. A star forms when a vast
idly.” cloud of gas and dust collapses. As it pulls in
The so-called on itself, and its density increases, it gets hot-
“Era of Nucleosyn- ter. When the temperature in the center of
thesis” — that is, the this collapsing star reaches about 10 million
era of creating atoms out degrees Celsius (18 million F), the nuclei of
of the primordial cosmic soup hydrogen atoms ram together with enough
A slice through the cen- — began one-thousandth of a second force to combine to form helium, and a new
ter of a massive star at after the Big Bang and lasted about three star is born.
the end of its life reveals minutes. By the end of this period, the uni- A star will continue the multi-step fusion
its onion-like structure. verse had expanded so much that the density process that yields helium for millions or bil-
The core is the hottest, had dropped too low for nucleosynthesis to lions of years. Inevitably, though, the supply
with successive outward continue. of hydrogen runs low. The star’s core shrinks
layers a bit cooler. Hydrogen and helium are the two most and gets hotter. As the core temperature rises
abundant elements in the universe. Hydrogen to slightly below one billion degrees Celsius
makes up about 75 percent of normal matter (1.8 billion F), helium begins to “burn” (a
(that is, detectable matter, not dark matter) physicist’s jargon for the process of nuclear
and helium about 25 percent. The remaining fusion) to form carbon (atomic number six).
one percent or so comprise what astronomers When the temperature climbs slightly higher,

 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2005
the star produces neon; at two billion degrees collapse.” This collapse generally produces a
Celsius (3.6 billion F), oxygen. titanic explosion called a supernova.
The energy released in these nuclear reac-

T
tions is what powers the stars. “That’s what his is not the end of
the star’s structure cares about,” Sneden says. the periodic table;
“The star’s structure could care less that it’s the universe contains
changing hydrogen into helium, helium to dozens of elements with
carbon … all it’s doing is squeezing the nuclei atomic numbers much high-
so tightly that they’ll fuse and release energy, er than iron. All of these
which stabilizes the star against the inward elements are produced by a
crunch of gravity.” The fusion of hydrogen to process called neutron cap-
helium converts about 0.7 percent of the mass ture. Instead of adding pro-
of the original hydrogen atoms to energy. The tons, an element grows more
Sun “fuses” about 600 million tons of hydro- massive by adding neutrons,
gen every second. This yields 596 million tons the electrically neutral par-
of helium atoms, while four million tons of ticles that make up an atom’s
mass are converted to energy. nucleus.
The core is the hottest part of the star, but There are two types of
after fusion starts, the rest of the star heats up neutron capture: slow and
naturally as the energy released from the core rapid. The slow process can
struggles outward. The star forms a layered create some elements, the
structure, like an onion; the core is the hot- rapid process creates others,
test layer, and successively outward layers are and some elements can be
cooler. formed by either process.
What happens next depends on the star’s The slow process (com-
mass. Stars like the Sun, and those up to monly called the s-process)
several times its mass, can only fuse elements occurs inside old stars called
up to oxygen. They simply don’t get hot and red giants — one of the final
dense enough to make heavier elements. stages in the life of a low-
When such a star has a core full of carbon mass star like the Sun before
and oxygen, it dies. Fusion stops, and the it becomes a white dwarf.
star’s outer layers blow off into space, forming One example in the night
a beautiful cloud of gas and dust known as sky is Aldebaran, which
a planetary nebula. The star’s leftover core, forms the bright orange “eye”
at the heart of the nebula, becomes a white of Taurus, the bull.
dwarf — a ball of matter only about as big as Red giants have exhausted
Earth, but containing most of the star’s mass. the supply of hydrogen fuel
It no longer produces energy through nuclear in their cores and have start-
reactions, but shines through the heat built ed to burn helium. This cre-
up during its long life. This will be the Sun’s ates free neutrons, which hit STScI/NASA (3)

fate. the nuclei of other elements

More massive stars, of course, exert greater inside the star. The neutrons
pressure on their cores, so their cores are cor- have no electrical charge, so they aren’t re- Sun-like stars eventually
respondingly hotter than those of lighter stars, pelled. They slowly enter the nucleus of the blow off their outer gas
allowing them to create elements heavier atom, one after another, until it becomes un- layers to form planetary
than oxygen. But when the core begins to stable. It then spits out an electron, so it forms nebulae, while their
burn silicon into iron (atomic number 26), a stable atom — and the next element on the cores remain intact as
fusion stops in these massive stars, too. In periodic table. white dwarfs, cooling for
fact, Sneden says, “all hell breaks loose.” The The rapid process (r-process) takes place in millenia.
fusion reactions that make elements heavier the cores of the most massive stars — those that
than iron are endothermic — that is, they are at least eight times as massive as the Sun.
use up more energy than the reaction gives The list of supermassive stars visible in the night
off. So “when you get an iron core,” Sneden sky includes Betelgeuse and Rigel in Orion, An-
says, “it sucks energy in and there’s a massive tares in Scorpius, and Spica in Virgo.

S ta r D at e 
 nuclei form gold, silver, plati-
num, and other exotic heavy
elements.
When stars explode as super-
novae, the elements they cre-
ated over their lifetimes — and
in their death throes — spew into
the galaxy, where they can be in-
corporated into new generations
of stars, planets — and perhaps
living organisms.
Each generation enriches the
gas of the galaxy with heavier ele-
ments. The fact that astronomers
find “living” stars with r-process
elements in their atmospheres
proves this, Sneden says.
Such a star had to be born from
NASA/ESA/H.E. Bond (STScI)

a gas cloud seeded with elements

from previous supernovae. If the
star had formed those r-process
within elements itself — “Kaboom!
It would be dead,” Sneden says.
Elements heavier than Because successive generations of stars con-
iron form through the tain more metals (all the elements heavier than
neutron-capture process. helium), it follows that the most metal-poor
Some form through the stars in the galaxy are the oldest, and the most
slow process in red-giant metal-rich are the youngest.
stars like V838 Monoc- Walter Baade figured out in the 1940s that
erotis (top), while others stars in the spiral arms of our Milky Way gal-
form through the rapid axy, such as the Sun, contain much higher
process in supernovae amounts of heavy elements than the stars in
like N132D (bottom, seen the galaxy’s halo — a vast spherical structure
in X-rays) in the Milky that surrounds the Milky Way’s bright disk. He
Way satellite galaxy the named the metal-rich stars of the spiral arms
Large Magellanic Cloud. “Population I,” and the metal-poor stars of the
halo “Population II.”
Sneden’s studies focus on understanding the
NASA/SAO/CXC

Milky Way’s history through detailed analyses

of stars’ chemical make-up. But this is hard to
do by studying the Sun and our solar system,
In the last days of its life, such a star pro- Sneden says. “So many different generations
duces a quick progression of ever-heavier of stars poured their elements into making the
elements. When its core is converted to material of our solar system that it’s hard to dis-
iron, fusion stops. Without the radiation entangle all of them. Big-mass stars, small-mass
of the fusion reactions, nothing protects stars, rapid-blast products, slow neutron cap-
the star from the inward crunch of its own ture, proton-proton cycle … It’s many different
great gravity. It explodes as a supernova. cycles from big- and small-mass stars.”
The explosion creates an enormous blast of He prefers to study the oldest stars in the gal-
neutrons, which bombard the nuclei of all axy. “I find these very metal-poor stars fascinat-
the atoms in the star’s core. There are so ing,” Sneden says. “The stars that I look at, way
many neutrons moving with such great en- out in the halo of the galaxy, they’re really old.
ergy that they rapidly attach themselves to That means they were born right at the begin-
all the available atoms. These neutron-rich ning of the galaxy. It’s a simpler time.”

 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2005
 When these stars formed, the Milky Way was back and forth over whether the evidence for
a galactic infant. It had not lived long enough to some artificial elements is convincing or not,
evenly distribute the elements that were blasted Cowan says.
Books
into space during the explosions of the earliest Artificial elements are created in labo-
Stellar Alchemy: The Celestial Origin
massive stars. As a result, today astronomers see ratories by accelerating particles to great
of Atoms, by Michel Cassé, 2003.
wild variations in the chemical compositions of speeds and then making them collide with
the galaxy’s oldest stars. target nuclei to create new elements. Such Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z
elements “live for literally a billionth or a Guide to the Elements, by John

P
Emsley, 2001.
art of Sneden’s work is helping to figure millionth of a second,” Cowan says
out what events influenced the chemi- “Over the decades,” he says, “people The Periodic Kingdom, by P.W.
cal makeup of the present-day galaxy. have suggested that there might be a way Adkins, 1995.
The fact that the oldest stars contain more eu- for super-heavy elements to be created in Internet
ropium (an r-process element made in super- certain supernova explosions. But no one Interactive Periodic Table
novae) than barium (an s-process element), has ever found such a thing.” chemicalelements.com
for example, means that the early formation of Unlike the naturally occurring elements, Natures of the Stars
elements in our galaxy was influenced by su- artificial elements 93 through 110 were www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/
pernova explosions more than anything else. named by their creators. Since uranium star_intro.html
Sneden also is trying to figure out just how old was named for the planet Uranus, physi-
the galaxy’s oldest stars are, which is one way to cists continued the theme with the first
tease out the age of the galaxy itself. “What I’ve two artificial elements: neptunium (atomic
been working on, which is still a matter of some number 93), named for Neptune, and plu-
dispute, is to try to age-date stars by thorium
and uranium,” he explains. “You have all
of these elements built by the rapid-blast
process, and many of them are stable. But
thorium and uranium are not.” So he stud-
ies the amounts of stable r-process elements Sun
in an ancient halo star and compares it to
the amount of thorium, which decays with
a half-life of about 14 billion years. In other
words, in 14 billion years, about half of the
thorium the star was born with should have
decayed to form other elements.
Based on the amount of stable elements
in a star, Sneden estimates how much tho-
Edge-on Milky Way

Tim Jones
rium the star should have been born with.
He then compares that to the amount it
appears to have now, and he sees about half
as much thorium as he predicted the star was tonium (94), for the then newly discovered The Sun lies in our
born with. The exact amounts are “trying to tell Pluto. Elements 111 and above are await- galaxy’s disk, with other
us that there’s been about 14 billion years since ing final names. metal-rich Population I
that thorium was made,” Sneden says. The ages Is the periodic table complete? Some phys- stars. The dots represent
depend on just how much thorium the star had icists don’t think so. They predict that big- globular star clusters in
at birth, though — a quantity that is still a sub- ger atom smashers will produce a slew of the galactic halo, filled
ject of intense debate, he notes. new elements. They have named this new with ancient, metal-poor
Neutron capture accounts for the creation of real estate of the periodic table “the island Population II stars.
the heaviest naturally made elements — those of stability” because they predict that these
up to element 92, uranium. But the periodic elements may last up to thousands of years.
table doesn’t end there. “Even if these elements are never found,”
According to Sneden’s collaborator John Sneden says, “the miracle is that we know
Cowan, a theorist at the University of Okla- how the elements were made. The periodic
homa, “there are roughly 14 to 20 artificial table is not a mystery.”
elements on top of the regular 92.” The exact
number is not certain because physicists argue Rebecca Johnson is the editor of StarDate.

S ta r D at e