☝️🤓 um akshually, no atoms came from the big bang since the universe immediately after the big bang was the plan planck epoch where all the fundamental forces were unified and particles didn’t really exist at all.
Then after the univers cooled enough (around 10^-32 seconds) the forces separated enough to form a quark-gluon plasma. Then around 10^-6 seconds it became cool enough for protons and neutrons to form. It wanst until a few minutes into the universe existing that it cooled enough for the first atoms/ atomic nuclei to form, and then it took hundreds of thousands of years for the universe to cool enough for electrons to be captured and form the first stable atoms.
troyunrau@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Lithium as well, if I recall correctly. Most lithium is theorized to date to the big bang. There are no current pathways to create it, and only pathways that destroy it.
Most helium also dates to big bang, but some was created through fusion or alpha decay.
Instigate@aussie.zone 11 months ago
Forgive my uneducated arse but is this a problem that cold fusion could solve? Like, could we theoretically create stable isotopes to use in significant enough quantities by fusing atomic nuclei and chucking or subtracting some electrons from the mix?
vithigar@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
No. A lack of stellar pathways to create lithium means that there isn’t a fusion chain that includes it. Recent evidence points to it being produced by particle bombardment in classical novae though, which we could in theory reproduce in particle accelerators. It would be ridiculously expensive though.