Posted on 02/15/2007 5:11:32 PM PST by Robert A Cook PE
We exist, therefore we question.
Or at least, that paraphrases (poorly) an old quote from an old scholar...
We know the masses and general composition of the four inner (rocky) planets in our solar system, and from basic chemistry, we know the number of atoms in a gram of any material.
Multiplying Avogadro's number x the mass of these four planets, dividing by a weighted average atomic weight for the materials in each planet, we get about 3 x 10^ 50 heavy nuclei produced since creation/the big bang.
Take your pick, that's the number of atomic nuclei we have to account for. Another 5 x 10^50 heavy nuclei are probably in the rocky cores of the Jovian planets, though core weights are very difficult to estimate. Astronomers estimate that icy comets and dust in the Oort cloud may double the mass of the inner eight planets.
So, in this little bitty solar system, we have (at least) 8 x 10^50 atomic nuclei that were created somehow.
Convention theory holds that these were formed inside supernova's, were ejected into space, captured by nearby stellar clouds, condensed into a star large enough to go supernova, went through another supernova and fused into higher level elements, and got ejected into space, captured by another gas cloud ... etc. Finally, they were captured by our proto-sun in our region of space, and, under gravity condensed into a spinning cloud that in turn, condensed further into rings, then these rings congealed into planets.
We see this process going on, and supernova's seem to occur in visible galaxies, about once every 50-100 years. Dust clouds ejected from supernova's in our galaxy within the last 1000 years are visible - clearly the conventional wisdom works.
Further, conventional teaching holds that the earth has been solid for 4.6 some-odd billion years - solid rocks in Canada and Australia test out that old, and are "untouched" by subsequent supernovas and catastrophic melting. The moon is a little older than those 4.5 billion years, and theory holds it was formed from a near-miss of an asteroid collision: was ejected into space as a large mass of earth's crust, then congealed into a sphere. So, we can prove from the moon and Canada that "new" matter has NOT been formed in the solar system in any quantity since at least 6-8 billion years ago.
But ... Dramatic pause.
There aren't enough supernova's, not enough nearby stars, and not enough time between the big bang (14.5 billion years ago) and the formation of the solid planet dust rings (6 some-odd billions of years ago) for the elements to have been created.
14.5 billion years (BB) - 6 billion years (solids as dust found orbiting a proto-sun in our solar system) = 8.5 billion years.
We are told that our sun is a second generation star, which reasonable, and that it will burn for another 4-6 billion years. Again, reasonable. The 100 closest stars are mostly much smaller than the sun, and most are dimmer than the sun. Sirius A, for example, is one of the few that are brighter than the sun. Distances vary of course, but most are further than 15-20 light-years. Obviously there are no supernova's nearby, and none have been nearby - or we would "see" the remnants of the supernova, and (if dark) we would have sensed the remainder as a black hole: since the black hole would distort light, radio, infrared, and microwave radiation nearby. No nearby "heavy" masses are found at all - out to some 30 light-years at least.
The wide-ranging COBE satellite surveys that were looking for minute distortions in the background microwave radiation, for example, would have sensed nearby distortions from near-earth black holes.
8 x 10^50 atomic nuclei / 8.5 x10^9 years /31.5 x10^6 seconds per year = 3 x 10^33 atoms ejected nearby supernova's per second, traveling through space for thousands of light-years at speeds just a small fraction of light, and re-entering our gas cloud. The closest star cluster is only 4.5 light-years away: that dust cloud is a very small target for dust to be randomly ejected into its gravitational field in time to get condensed into planets.
3 x 10^33 nuclei per second sounds like a lot, and it is. But spread out over a dust cloud the size of the proto-solar system, it (almost) sounds reasonable.
But consider the requirement that ALL of these 10^50 element nuclei being ejected in one generation from a "cloud" of thousands of billions of supernova's surrounding the sun, all of these supernovas randomly but evenly spaced close enough to our dust cloud that enough of their randomly ejected elements drift our direction.
Further, these randomly-but-evenly spaced
supernova's all have to gather into superstars, go through a complete lifecycle, and go supernova in very close to the same time: a particle of dust (itself many trillions of trillions of atoms - each having had to get generated itself) that comes by our future solar system's cloud too early, or too late, will not get captured by the future sun. If you assume that the average dust particle coasts through space faster (so its travel time is less getting here so there is more time for supernova's to condense and blow up) then you have to assume that the coordinated "supernova" time for all of the first generation supernovas is even more closely timed.
Ignore the need for our galaxy's dust cloud of H and He to congeal from the expanding gasses randomly ejected from the BB, for these gasses and dust particles to themselves drift into proto-stars, and for the first generation of stars (all of the first generation stars cannot be assumed to be supernova-sized of course) to go through the billions of years to change from a H-H to H-He, to Li, to Be ... up to the carbon and neon and eventually into the iron fusion changes. See, all of the heavier-than-iron atomic nuclei have to be created as well, and they can ONLY be created after the iron cycle begins: granted, there are not as many heavier-than-iron particles as the lighter ones: H, He, nitrogen, silicon, carbon, etc are much more readily found than the heavier ores. But many billons of tons of these atoms are certainly present. And every nucleus in every gram of every ton of ore, in current theory at least, has to come from its own supernova.
Granted, the universe is considered to be "smaller" the earlier that you go back in time. A smaller universe means that any given supernova is closer to the (future) position of our galaxy's (future) dust cloud, and our own sun's (future) dust cloud.
But a closer supernova still ejects 99.9 percent of its newly-formed heavy elements the wrong direction. They may form other planets, but they are useless in forming our own planet. (And, being a dweller of this planet, I can afford to be a bit selfish about not caring whether other solar systems have rocky planets or not.) Now, 99.9% of the heavy nuclei going the wrong direction is better than 99.9999 percent going the wrong direction, but it still means that many tens of thousands of supernova's are required to create our own solar system - with all of the heavy elements as we know it now.
Further, we could suppose (somehow, and no mathematical or theoretical reason exists to justify these assumptions) that the first generation of stars was somehow different that today's second generation of stars: somehow the first generation gathered tens of thousands quicker than the dust clouds we see in global clusters and nebulas, condensed into super heavy stars quicker than they do now and were much more likely to gather into super heavy dust clouds than they do now, and those newly-condensed super-heavy stars burned through their nuclear fuel cycles tens of thousands of time faster than they do now.
All these assumptions are possible.
But, if they are correct, where did the 10^40 (?) supernova remnants go? Where are they now? They could only be 10^9 through 10^12 years old, and could not be very far from our galaxy and our sun: Why can we not find them? Our search for black holes reveals less than a few dozen heavy objects. The galaxy might have a massive black hole at its center. But even assuming that every galaxy has a black hole at center, that leaves 10^25 left to discover.
Heat, pressure, times, energy levels, and percentage of elements produced work out reasonably well.
But that leaves the original question: Where did today's heavy elements come from, if we can't find the missing supernova's from the first generation stars that created them from hydrogen and helium?
You just got through saying the heavy elements were created in an Snova. Look at your hand and the computer you're typing on. That's the remnant's of the Snova.
Bookmark
ML/NJ
"Further,t none go through the math or mention the transition from supernova-creates-elements-and-ejects-them to the next step of dust-cloud-forms-and-our-sun-begins-rotating-and-condensing ..."
Well if you don't take a course in astrophysics, you can't have much of an in depth knowledge about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_capture
I'm not fully stupid when it comes to science, but this stuff just doesn't make any sense. It seems like they're making something we have absolutely no idea about, into something extremely complicated.
Why can't scientists just say "we don't know?"
Maybe there's no universe, either. Maybe we're all like.. brains in a vat, man.
They will not believe it was the Klingons!
Consider what you said.
The universe itself is expanding and such an early burst would by now have not only dispersed itself by its own energy, but would have been carried along by the universe's expansion as well.
How large would such an early burst be by now? Could we hope to detect such a diluted signature?
good question- Physicist? any thoughts?
One explanation worth considering is that the Big Bang never happened, and that anything is possible given infinite time. For thirty reasons that a respected astrophysicist believes in an ageless cosmos, see... http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/top10BBproblems.asp
http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/BB-top-30.asp
Namely, the further out you look, the further back in time you look.
Hence, any ancient "local" events would by now be far too distributed to be detectable.
I've also wondered at the apparent superabundance of elements Fe and above. There doesn't seem to have been enough time and enough supernovae. My guess is that we've either misjudged the time scale or, much more speculatively, the early universe was not composed of bare quarks, but already consisted of nuclei, including heavy atoms and that the BB was not really a truly universal origin but a local bubble protruded by a more encompassing process.
A bit over my head, but ping to someone who may understand.
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