Quarkety Quark (3)


Posted 05/04/2013:

(Continued from part 2)

After reading about the “theory” surrounding primordial elements, my mind meandered off the path within the picture Dr. Pagels had painted.  I asked myself a simple question, “If we are descended from the dust of the stars, then how much of us comes unchanged from the big bang, and how much of us comes unchanged from the death of the first stars?”

The theory, continued, says that the first stars were short lived.  Fiery behemoths, they survived only for a few hundred million years after the big bang.  This amount of time is trivial in cosmological terms.

My question seemed more simple than the answer I pulled from an online astro-physicist’s forum. Said answer is one that has been conjectured, only recently,  as a result of the supporting evidence found by the application of extraterrestrial radio signal study and a whale of a lot of statistics.

According to these scholarly resources, not much of us succeeds directly from the big bang.  Some hydrogen, and a tiny bit of helium may succeed directly from the first seconds of the big bang.  Now, billions of years later, we can attribute the source of the elements that make up our bodies to material ejected in the massive super novas that destroyed the primordial stars.  Hence, we are stardust, but not really big bang dust.  Within the outer regions of primordial stars, in the moments of their destruction, were energy levels conducive to the formation of heavier elements (all of those outside of the four primordial elements).

Bits and pieces and debris, in the form of the planets and asteroids flying about the universe, are made up of those heavier elements.  These bits and pieces sometimes get recycled back into stars, the centers of which contain energy levels high enough to destroy them, transmuting them into lighter primordial elements once again.

Certain areas of the universe are plasma “hot.”  These areas are recycling areas.  Other areas are relatively cold, and it is in these colder areas that direct descendants of the first stars still exist.  The earth is in a “cold” area, and so we can count on being stardust of the primordial kind.  The incredibly romantic thing about it is that it’s a statement literally interpreted.  Many of the elemental atoms, now making up the complicated organic compounds inside of the hearts that beat in our chests, are unchanged from that time inside the exterior regions of  disintegrating primordial stars.

My question remains unanswered, completely. The complete answer includes an explanation built around this: “What percentage of primordial stardust exists inside of our universe?”  Scientists have studied a particular atom intensely, towards an answer to the question.


To be continued …

Go to part four: https://ronaldscheckelhoff.wordpress.com/quarkety-quark-4/

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