Born to do Math 52 – Metaprimes (Part 18)

In-Sight Publishing
Born to do Math 52 - Metaprimes (Part 18)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

April 28, 2017

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Stars, it is easy to fuse raw protons, which are Hydrogen nuclei, together. The easiest thing to do in a star is to fuse Hydrogen into Deuterium, Tritium, and then Helium. Mostly. That takes the least amount of pressure. It takes more pressure to turn Helium into stuff. As stars cook down, they do a lot of stuff. They cool down, expand, and sometimes blow off the outer shell. Depending on how much the various elements are in the star depending on the size of the star, some stars can hang up to the point where they are almost entirely Oxygen and Carbon.

That’s a smaller star. A bigger star, the one the size of our Sun can keep cooking until it is almost entirely Iron. But at some point, there’s no more energy to be gained from being further cooked down and smushed down. Most stars stop, but some bigger stars can keep going to become neutron stars, and can be mushed down – probably not the right thing to say – and they are kind of one big nucleus.

Other stars can keep going from that point until they are a blackish hole. Iron is the last element that you can produce as a huge percentage of the mass of a star. The elements beyond Iron are kind of produced in like artisanal batches by supernova explosives, where the pressure wave pushes through heavy nuclei and smushes them further together, but the curve of binding energy. It is the curve of how much energy it takes per nucleon – per proton and neutron—

It is the binding energy there is released for each nucleon in that nucleus. It reaches a peak at Iron. To get any heavier elements, you will not be creating energy. There will not be any large scale burning. That’s how heavier elements are formed, in the interior of stars as they boil themselves down and then explode.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

1. Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
2. Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
3. Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
4. This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

1. American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
2. Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

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Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.
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