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ickplant@lemmy.world to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 309 points –
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Everything except hydrogen. And technically, only elements that are heavier than iron necessarily come from exploding stars. The lighter elements are made in non-exploding stars and could, at least theoretically, be distributed across the universe without a supernova.

Lithium as well, if I recall correctly. Most lithium is theorized to date to the big bang. There are no current pathways to create it, and only pathways that destroy it.

Most helium also dates to big bang, but some was created through fusion or alpha decay.

Forgive my uneducated arse but is this a problem that cold fusion could solve? Like, could we theoretically create stable isotopes to use in significant enough quantities by fusing atomic nuclei and chucking in or subtracting some electrons from the mix?

☝️🤓 um akshually, no atoms came from the big bang since the universe immediately after the big bang ( the planck epoch) was so hot and dense that all the fundamental forces were unified and particles didn't really exist at all.

Then after the univers cooled enough (around 10^-32 seconds) the forces separated enough to form a quark-gluon plasma. Then around 10^-6 seconds it became cool enough for free protons and neutrons to form. It wanst until a few minutes into the universe existing that it cooled enough for the first atomic nuclei to form, and then it took hundreds of thousands of years for the universe to cool enough for electrons to be captured and form the first stable atoms.