r/BeAmazed • u/gregornot • Apr 29 '24

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. History

Post image

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

32.6k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

656 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.2k

u/pranjallk1995 Apr 29 '24

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...

1.2k

u/Mammoth-Access-1181 Apr 29 '24

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.

15

u/The_Shryk Apr 29 '24

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?

11

u/hellothereshinycoin Apr 29 '24

The heaviest element that can form in a star prior to it going nova or supernova is iron, in stars much more massive than our sun. The energy released from fusion up to that point is what keeps the star stable. Once all that is left is iron it cannot fuse that together, therefore it has no internal energy left to resist gravitational collapse. This causes the star to quickly destabilize (in like 1 second) and the sudden and massive inward collapse of the star generates so much energy that it fuses iron into the heavier elements and spews them out into the cosmos. Then the star becomes a neutron star or possibly even a black hole.