Gittel holds a pencil. Its graphite is carbon. Hydrogen and helium have filled the universe since early on, but carbon is another matter. Somewhere, something had to make it.
You saw that a star fuses hydrogen into helium in its core. Fusion does not stop there. This lesson says where the rest of the elements came from.
A star spends its lifetime fusing light nuclei into heavier ones.
Hydrogen fuses into helium first.
Later in its life, a star fuses the helium it has built, and the products of that, into progressively heavier nuclei.
That is where the chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were made: inside stars.
The carbon and oxygen atoms in your body were fused inside earlier generations of stars.
This course states the fact and leaves the step-by-step routes inside stars to later courses.
Where were the carbon atoms in a pencil's graphite made?
Carbon is heavier than hydrogen and helium.
The elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were made by fusion inside stars.
The pencil's carbon existed before the sun did, so the stars that fused it came earlier.
Inside earlier generations of stars: fusion there built the carbon, long before the pencil.
A star has fused hydrogen into helium for most of its life so far. What does it fuse later in its life?
A star fuses light nuclei into progressively heavier ones over its lifetime.
The helium it has built becomes its next fuel.
Later in its life, the star fuses helium and the heavier nuclei it builds from it, making progressively heavier elements.
Where were the chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium made?
Where were the calcium atoms in your bones originally made?
Stars fusing light nuclei into progressively heavier ones, building the elements, is called what?
Which statement about where the chemical elements came from is correct?
A star fuses for its whole lifetime. What happens to the kinds of nuclei inside it over that lifetime?
Which of the following did stellar nucleosynthesis supply?