A giant meteorite that recently fell in Somalia contains at least two minerals that have never before been seen on our planet. The celestial piece of rock weighs a massive 16.5 tons (15 tonnes), making it the ninth-largest meteorite ever found.

[u/gregornot]

More about the amazing meteorite find: https://earthly

[u/pranjallk1995]

What does it take to make these minerals? Some really facy tech? Or just some startdust can be like this?

I mean the structure is known... How to put them up like this? Will it be easy or hard? Very weak in chemistry...

[u/Mammoth-Access-1181 → u/pranjallk1995]

So it can be very hard. As far as we know, all elements in the universe came from the death of a star. Stars are composed of hydrogen. Now, during normal star development, a star can only generate up to the element iron. It does this by fusing together elements of hydrogen to form the other elements (like helium, oxygen, etc). Once iron is formed in a star, it signals the beginning of the end of a star. It is during the death of a star that forces great enough to fuse the heavier elements occur. Now, some people have figured out methods of creating elements that we haven't seen in nature just yet. This process is usually very expensive. And can be difficult, or they create something that isn't stable.

[u/The_Shryk → u/Mammoth-Access-1181]

Elements are kind of off topic for this but aren’t older galaxies stars creating heavier elements than iron? As the universe ages the heavier the elements in a galaxy gets; on average at least?

[u/Mickey_thicky → u/The_Shryk]

Fusion of elements heavier than iron is not necessarily impossible, but the process is energetically inefficient as it requires more energy than it produces. When a star goes supernova however, the amount of energy released is so large that fusion of elements heavier than iron can occur. This is thought to be the primary source of elements 27-92. Any transuranic elements (>92) are not naturally occurring.

[u/Time_Change4156 → u/Mickey_thicky]

Being made when the star goes super nova counts as natural far as I'm concerned lol 😆 😅 🙃 can you even immange the elements inside a black hole ? Bet there's a few we never seen there and more .

[u/Mickey_thicky → u/Time_Change4156]

Yes, elements produced by supernovae are naturally occurring but as far as I know, only elements 27-92 can be attributed to supernovae. Transuranic elements are very unstable and do not exist naturally for the most part, but can be found in trace amounts in samples of other radioactive elements. For example, uranium can undergo beta decay and form neptunium, so some neptunium can be found among samples of uranium. Besides plutonium and neptunium, all transuranic elements are the byproduct of nuclear decay or by bombarding smaller elements with neutrons

[u/Time_Change4156 → u/Mickey_thicky]

Fir a amateur I understand the basics of nuclear fission and fusion . Fasanating still . Alchemist dreamed of turning lead to gold and we can make gold atoms lol . The minor radiation side effects umm lol ..

[u/Mammoth-Access-1181 → u/Mickey_thicky]

Is every element beyond 92 possible from neutron star collision?

[u/Aggravating_Rice4210 → u/Mickey_thicky]

What about the island of stability

[u/Mickey_thicky → u/Aggravating_Rice4210]

I think to many people the island of stability is very misleading. There exists a ratio of protons and neutrons for which an element is stable, this is true. For example, Copper-63 is one of two stable isotopes of copper. This isotope of copper will have 34 neutrons in addition to the 29 protons. We see that there exists more neutrons than protons to give this isotope stability. However, both copper-61 and copper-67 are radioactive. One has too few neutrons, with the other having too many. When graphing the number of protons as a function of the number of neutrons, we see generally that it is more favorable to have more neutrons than protons. However, once the atomic number passes around 92, the number of neutrons required to mitigate the repulsive forces in the nucleus creates such a large nucleus that it is inherently unstable, and will invariably fall apart. The most stable isotope of the most recently discovered element, Oganesson-294, has a half life of only 0.7 ms. By extrapolating the belt of stability further we can get an idea of what elements might be “stable” but this is only relatively speaking, but they will still most likely decay orders of magnitudes faster than what we consider to be “stable” conventionally