[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet.

[Amara Graps]

The Avantguardian avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com
>I suppose it was just after the death of the first
>generation hydrogen supergiant stars that synthesized
>the first middle-weight atomic nuclei that are the
>constituents of life (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen,
>sulfur, and phosphorus) but before the heavy and
>transition metal nuclei (iron, tin, lead, etc) were
>created.

Maybe not.. here is some Spitzer data that hint that the first stars
were very big, very hot, and because of their mass, would have been
very short-lived (you forgot the lifetime of these first stars in your
hypothesis). If the interpretation on these data are correct, then
these stars will have no trouble producing the heavy elements via the
r or s processes of nucleosynthesis (*) quickly.

PhysicsWeb news item
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/9/11/2/1

BBC News item
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4400672.stm

Phil Plait's blog discussion of this discovery
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/?p=206

Amara


(*) http://ultraman.ssl.berkeley.edu/nucleosynthesis.html
-- 

********************************************************************
Amara Graps, PhD          email: amara at amara.com
Computational Physics     vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers         URL:   http://www.amara.com/
********************************************************************
"It is intriguing to learn that the simplicity of the world depends
upon the temperature of the environment." ---John D. Barrow