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Heavy Elements

9 June 2024
cosmology, Electromagnetism

At https://www.sciencealert.com/new-evidence-challenges-origin-theory-on-the-universes-heaviest-elements … the mainstream consensus is that after Big Bang the universe consisted mainly of hydrogen and a bit of helium. These are the lightest elements in the periodic table. Hence, all elements heavier than helium were produced in the 13.8 billion years between Big Bang and now. Stars have produced many of these heavier elements, it is thought, but there is a problem. They only include elements up to and including iron. The creation of any heavier elements would consume energy, instead of releasing it. A bit of an untalked about dilemma as far as the general public are aware. That  hurdle was overcome by latching on to supernova events. It is of course thoroughly theoretical. Basically, gamma ray bursts are seen as capable of producing heavy elements. Then, along comes the James Webb Space Telescope, and observations of supernova, or what are thought to be supernova explosions, do not conform to the rhetoric. Cosmologists may have to look for another source of heavy elements. Will they, at some point, look at plasma and electromagnetism ?

At https://phys.org/news/2024-06-strange-intermittent-radio-space-astronomers.html … astronomers sometimes detect sporadic bursts of radio waves originating somewhere in the vast expanse of the universe. They are known as radio transients. Current thinking is they originate from rotating neutron stars known as pulsars. These stars spin at incredible speeds, it is thought. Thornill and Talbot, in their book, ‘The Electric Universe‘, page 82, say that plasma physicists have shown that complex pulsar signals can be explained by plasma discharges in a stellar magnetosphere [Healy and Peratt, Radiation Properties of Pulsar Magnetosphere, in ‘Astrophysics and Space Series: 1995’. We may wonder if this explains why supernovas can explode on more than one occasion, as noticed by astronomers in recent years. It seems like there is a wide gulf between cosmologists, mostly theoretical, and plasma scientists, working in a laboratory and conducting experiments. See also https://doi.org/10.1002/2015GL063699/full

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