Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Background: what you need to know before you start
- 1 Gravity on Earth:
- 2 And then came Newton
- 3 Satellites
- 4 The Solar System
- 5 Tides and tidal forces
- 6 Interplanetary travel
- 7 Atmospheres
- 8 Gravity in the Sun
- 9 Reaching for the stars
- 10 The colors of stars
- 11 Stars at work
- 12 Birth to death
- 13 Binary stars
- 14 Galaxies
- 15 Physics at speed
- 16 Relating to Einstein
- 17 Spacetime geometry
- 18 Einstein's gravity
- 19 Einstein's recipe
- 20 Neutron stars
- 21 Black holes
- 22 Gravitational waves
- 23 Gravitational lenses
- 24 Cosmology
- 25 The Big Bang
- 26 Einstein's Universe
- 27 Ask the Universe
- Appendix: values of useful constants
- Glossary
- Index
11 - Stars at work
Factories for the Universe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Background: what you need to know before you start
- 1 Gravity on Earth:
- 2 And then came Newton
- 3 Satellites
- 4 The Solar System
- 5 Tides and tidal forces
- 6 Interplanetary travel
- 7 Atmospheres
- 8 Gravity in the Sun
- 9 Reaching for the stars
- 10 The colors of stars
- 11 Stars at work
- 12 Birth to death
- 13 Binary stars
- 14 Galaxies
- 15 Physics at speed
- 16 Relating to Einstein
- 17 Spacetime geometry
- 18 Einstein's gravity
- 19 Einstein's recipe
- 20 Neutron stars
- 21 Black holes
- 22 Gravitational waves
- 23 Gravitational lenses
- 24 Cosmology
- 25 The Big Bang
- 26 Einstein's Universe
- 27 Ask the Universe
- Appendix: values of useful constants
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
In this chapter we open the door to our own history. Surely one of the most satisfying discoveries of modern astronomy is how the natural processes of the Universe led to the conditions in which a small planet could condense around an obscure star in an ordinary looking galaxy, and life could evolve on that planet.
In this chapter: we look at the way stars have created the chemical elements out of which the Earth, and our bodies, are formed. The nuclear reactions in generations of stars that burned out before our Sun was formed produced these elements. But the physics is subtle, and nearly does not allow it. We examine this issue, and also show how the study of a by-product of nuclear energy generation in the Sun, neutrinos, has revealed new fundamental physics.
The evolution of life seems to have required many keys, but one of them is that the basic building blocks had to be there: carbon, oxygen, calcium, nitrogen, and all the other elements of living matter. The Universe did not start out with these elements. The Big Bang, which we shall learn more about in Chapter 24 to Chapter 27, gave us only hydrogen and helium, the two lightest elements. All the rest were made by the stars. Every atom of oxygen in our bodies was made in a star.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Gravity from the Ground UpAn Introductory Guide to Gravity and General Relativity, pp. 121 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003