life on heaven

Life on HeavenAtoms and Stardust in Human Composition

Lorena GomezFall 2012

COLLEGE PHYSICS 1 GOMEZ 1

"The most astounding fact about the universe, is the knowledge, that the atoms that comprise life on

Earth, the atoms that make up the human body are traceable, to the crucibles that cooked light

elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures.These stars, the

high mass ones among them went unstable in their later years, they collapsed and then exploded

scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy, guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the

fundamental ingredients of life itself." - Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Over many years, physicist have tried to unfold the beginning of the

universe. Their curiosity and persistency pushed them into dimensions people

never thought possible. With this curiosity also came an innate sense to explore the

start of human life. The quote presented above is from a famous astrophysicist

named Neil DeGrasse Tyson. A reporter asked Tyson what is the most astounding

fact he could tell people about the universe, his reply was about how the same

particles that make up a star, live within all of us. I too find this to be one of the

most astounding things I've ever heard about the universe. For this reason, I chose

to explore it a little further on my own.


THE HUMAN BODY

The human body, like all forms of matter, is composed of a series of atoms.

Atoms are the basic building blocks of matter. What an atom is

composed of gives an object its mass. Atoms, contain protons,

positively charged particles, neutrons, particles with no charge,

and electrons, particles with a negative charge. Let's take an

atom of Helium for example, located on the upper right hand corner of the page.

Helium has an atomic number of two, it has an atomic weight of four. Its

atom is made of two protons, two neutrons, and two electrons.

The atoms in the human body are of four main elements;


NitrogenHydrogenOxygen Carbon

Together, these atoms form molecules. For example, hydrogen and oxygen come

together to form a water molecule. Water is one of the most abundant molecules in

our bodies.

Sixty-five percent of our mass is made of oxygen, however, on an atomic scale, only

twenty-four percent of our atoms are of oxygen. Twenty-four percent? We breathe

in oxygen, if that's not the highest in our bodies, than what is? Surprisingly, the

most abundant element in our human composition is Hydrogen. By mass,

hydrogen only makes up ten percent of our bodies, but atomically hydrogen makes

up sixty-three percent of our atoms. Leaving carbon with atomically twelve percent

and nitrogen a sad 0.58 %.

Some elements, were meant to be together so to say, most scientists would

use water to describe this sort of relationship. Water, or the dynamic duo, is a

molecule with a strong, and mutual relationship. Water consists of two hydrogen

atoms per one oxygen atom. The image on the right is a

diagram of the distribution of particles within a water

molecule. As one can see, the hydrogen atoms form what's

known as a covalent bond with the single oxygen atom.

This creates a partial positive charge towards the hydrogens

and a partial negative charge towards the oxygen.


Let us observe this formation of water in simpler terms.

First we can observe that both the hydrogen and oxygen atoms travel in

pairs. These atoms are what's known as diatomic, meaning, "two atoms." Oxygen is

an atom bearing a negative charge, in order for this diatomic molecule to be stable

and comfortable floating around on its own, it must be held together by a double

bond. This double bond is broken by the oxygen wanting to fill its octet, thus seeing

vulnerable diatomic hydrogen as its newly found prey. It brings the hydrogens over

and creates for itself a much more stable arrangement than it had before, this

repeated reaction is the birth of water. This comes to no surprise that the elements

that form water are the most abundant in our bodies. Water makes up three-fourths

of our bodies and aids in various bodily functions, such as, regulation of body

temperature, nutrient absorption, cellular respiration and blood flow.


“There’s a poem by Longfellow about watching the learners astronomer measure the stars or something, and he goes out and gazes silently up at the sky. Well, when he gazes silently up at the

sky he sees these little points of light in this blackness. When a scientist gazes silently up at the sky, he sees these enormous suns and galaxies and magnetic fields and turbulence and the heat and the cold and the molecules in between them in space. And endless distances, and great mysteries and

you have a feeling, if you’re a scientist that you see a lot more.” - Joan Feynman


TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR

One might not think much of anything, when we hear the word star, or for

that fact even look at one. It’s difficult to think that a star goes through a life cycle

similar to ours. It is born, it lives, it grows old, and then it dies. It is hard to

imagine, that the night sky we look at, sustains life in its own way. We look, and we

see small specks of light, drenched upon a black, blank slate. Scientists have taken a

much closer look at this blank slate, only to discover that it isn’t blank at all, but full

of the basic necessities for stars, and potential for new galaxies.

One could simply look up,”the night

sky” on google and generate images like this

one on the right. However, what exactly is this

an image of ? You might look at it and think,

but the night sky is clear blank nothingness. To the naked eye, that might be

correct, but to the scientific eye it is full of things to explore. This image is not a

star, but something called cosmic dust.

The universe is full of dust, literally. It is the foundation for star formation,

thus it is everywhere. A well known example, is the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky


Way Galaxy is a collection of concentrated dust clouds. Different particles make up

these dust clouds, the most abundant one referred to as dust grains. Dust grains are

amorphous1 carbonaceous solids that contain some hydrogen but little to no

nitrogen or oxygen. They have extremely low temperatures, ranging from negative

268 degrees Celsius, to five degrees above zero. This cosmic dust, made of dust

grains, makes up one thousandth of the Milky Way’s mass, this is hundreds of

times more than the total mass of all the galaxy’s planets. The particles are

unevenly distributed in small amounts, one could have a few in one area and then

see a few more a million cubic meters away. A cluster of all these dust grains leads

to what’s known as a gas cloud.

In the 1940s a dutch astronomer by the name of Henk van de Hulst

proposed a theory that, “The atoms known to exist in interstellar space - hydrogen,

oxygen, carbon and nitrogen - would adhere to the cold surfaces of dust grains and

form mantles of frozen water, methane, and ammonia.” (Greenberg 2000.) It

wasn’t until 1970 that astronomers found that Hulst was indeed correct. Testing of

the infrared spectra of light passing through stardust, showed traces of carbon

monoxide, carbon dioxide, formaldehyde, and many other compounds. These

compounds are shown below;


1 without a clearly defined shape or form.

2 3

But what is it exactly that gives these dust clouds their ability to form? This

question brings us to the interstellar medium.

“Condensed objects in galaxies, ranging from stars to planets, from comets

and asteroids to cosmic dust grains, derive their matter and their chemical make-up

from the interstellar medium ( ISM).”-(Witt 2001)

Simply stated, the interstellar medium is the space in between stars. Despite

this, there is nothing simple about this space at all. This area is in fact, very


2 carbon monoxide3 carbon dioxide

chemically fruitful. The interstellar medium is composed of various phases, each

distinguished by whether matter is present in ionic, atomic or molecular forms.

Atoms from gas clouds can be heated through various ways here in the interstellar

medium, one way of heating, is called grain-gas heating. This type of heating

happens from collisions between gas atoms and molecules with dust grains, these

collisions transfer a type of thermal energy. This form of heating is very dominant

among large and vast dust clouds. Another common form of heating dust grains is

via chemical heating, where the dust grains form diatomic hydrogen molecules on

the surface. These molecules are distributed via vibration and rotation, creating

kinetic energy with the dust grains. The most abundant element in the interstellar

medium is hydrogen, just like in the dust clouds, and in our very own bodies.

“It is on the super-cold surfaces of such silicate or ice grains that atoms are

stitched together to make a wide range of molecules. These molecules radiate heat,

which cases gas clouds to collapse to form suns. Later, those molecules, still stuck to

stardust, rain down on planets, providing the building blocks of biology. “- (Chown

2012). This brings us to the formation of our planet, planet Earth.


“Consider again that pale blue dot we’ve been talking about. Imagine, that you take a good long look at it, imagine, you’re staring at the dot for any length of time. And then, try to convince yourself, that god, created the whole universe for one of the ten billion or so species of life that

inhabit that speck of dust.” - Carl Sagan


THE BLUE PLANET

Our planet, like the stars, came from nothing. Picture a hydrogen atom if

you will, alone it is nothing, but multiply this atom by ten to the sixteenth power

and that’s more than a trillion hydrogen atoms. Together, they create the

immensely powerful pull of gravity. From these hydrogens, comes the formation of

stars. Nevertheless, what happened once these stars grew old, and collapsed? When

the first major stars burst, they unleashed their fruitful particles and elements they

had created, out into the universe. All the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus,

and sulfur- the elements of life - were now incredibly overflowing.

The first chemical reactions following the Big Bang produced various

molecules; water, ammonia, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, are just a

few of the most common molecules excreted by supernovas4 after the big bang.

Then came the formation of minerals. When the temperature of these gases

remained cool enough but their densities increased, various minerals formed.


4 Exploding stars.

THE LION

It was about 4.6 billion years ago, that the shockwave a nearby nebula

started the birth of a massive star called The Sun. Over the course of a million

years, pre-solar gases and dust slowly spun being drawn inward. This massive dust

cloud twirled faster and faster, as the centripetal force of gravity pulled it closer and

closer towards its center. This cloud became denser and flattened, with on growing

bulge in its center, so was the formation of the sun. This bulge became thirsty and

thirster for hydrogen, with the vast amounts of hydrogen in the universe, it grew

larger and larger. With its size came the spike of its internal temperature and

pressure, finally igniting the sun. With the birth of this magnificent star, comes the

birth of our big, blue, planet.

“To get a sense of the scale of Earth history, imagine walking back in time, a

hundred years per step - every pace equal to more than three human generations.

A mile takes you 175,000 years into the past. The twenty miles of Chesapeake

cliffs, a hard day’s walk to be sure, correspond to more than 3 million years. But to

make even a small dent in Earth history, you would have to keep walking at that

rate for many weeks. Twenty days of effort at twenty miles a day and a hundred

years per step would take you back 70 million years, to just before the mass death of

dinosaurs. Five months of twenty-mile walks would correspond to more than 530


million years, the time of the Cambrian “explosion”- the near- simultaneous

emergence of myriad hard-shelled animals. But at a hundred years per footstep,

you’d have to walk for almost three years to reach the dawn of life, and almost four

years to arrive at Earth’s beginnings.” (Hazen 2012)

A solar nebula5 escaped into the atmosphere and began to form the molten

lava center of Earth, this in about 10-20 million years cooled down and began to

form the crust of Earth. This crust made it possible for water to begin

accumulating on the planet.

As one can conclude, one thing leads to another. It was a series of chain

reactions that lead to the birth of our planet Earth, and essentially, human kind.

The same elements that created our cells; hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and

nitrogen, are the same elements that live in our universe.


5 a cloud of dust and gas from the sun.

“So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us.

When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small because they’re small and the Universe is big – but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of

connectivity. That’s really what you want in life, you want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant you want to feel like a participant in the goings on of activities and events around you

That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive…”- Neil DeGrasse Tyson


ReferencesHazen, R. (2012). The story of earth. (pp. 7-31). New York, NY: Penguin Group

Berman, B. (2011). It's element-ary. Astronomy, 39(10), 10-10.

Chown, M. (2012). Made in heaven. Stardust Revolution: the New Story of Our Origin in the Stars,215(2880), 48-48.

Fessenden, M.(2012). Stardust Revolution: The New Story of Our Origin in the Stars. Stardust Revolution: The New Story of Our Origin in the Stars, 215 (2880).

Max , B., Scott , S., & Louis, A. (1999). Life's far-flung raw materials. Scientific American, 42-49.

Greenberg, J. M. (2000). The secrets of stardust. Scientific American, 70-75.

Nick, S., & Judith, Y. (1984). Molecular clouds, star formation and galactic structure. Scientific American, 42-53.

Adolf, W. (1959). The chemical composition of the interstellar medium. The Royal Society, 1949-1959.Retrieved from www.jstor.com

Bart, B. (1972). The birth of stars. Scientific American, 49-61.Retrieved from www.jstor.com

Nick, S. (1999). The solar system in the next millennium.The Royal Society, 3300-3317. Retrieved from www.jstor.com


life on heaven

Documents