Six atoms? How do we know that hasn't just drifted from all of those leaking soviet navy reactors scuttled in the arctic? Those were breeders with heavy neutron production.
@@hawkdsl I've known a very few male humans who completely left their childhood in the dust. They are very grumpy, never satisfied with life, and often have high blood pressure and/or multiple heart attacks.
I was aware the heavy elements came out of supernovae, but it never occurred to me that there was a limit to what they could produce. Today I learned that the heaviest elements require a black hole to be formed by merging neutron stars... just goes to show you just how common in the universe something we didn't even have confirmation of existing until about 50 years ago is.
The supposed mechanism doesn't seem to be adequate for the abundance of heavy elements that exist: A star explodes and stuff is strewn in all directions. Then we find substantial, but localized iron deposits on one planet far, far away from the stars that exploded. In fact, we have a planetary core that is rich in iron. Sure, supernovae can create heavy elements, but there seems to be too much space for that to be the only plausible source of what we find.
Your video sent me on a quick yet deep dig into the contents of interstellar mediums to answer a question and came back to your video with full comprehension - your videos are an endless source of thought provoking curiosity and I must thank you for that! Keep up the good work! Fly safe!
I'm a geologist. I'm also embarrassed to say that I've never thought of radioactive rock as being "spicy". Going forward, I plan to fully rectify this discrepancy. Thanks again, Scott!
60 half-lifes? Everyone knows there can only be two Half-Lifes, and after that, what's left just disappears instantaneously in a process called newellisation.
Sometimes I find it hard with my high school chemistry and physics classes to keep with Scott. But,,,I still enjoy listening and picking up new information.
Neutron star collisions gets my vote too. With the latest study, that they don't shrink over time, and their astrophysical jets aren't 180 degrees... There is a lot there we don't know.
Now do tell! Why the hell couldn't MY chemistry teacher be this entertaining? Thank you Scott! Btw. You COULD have, say, a 'random Wednesday' segment where you cover such random off-the-main-track' items... Either way - thank you for being you.
This is like listening to heavy metal music. I have no idea what I am listening too or if I even like it, but it sounds fascinating and even compelling, and so I keep listening. What a great way to get an education.
This is fantastic. When I took geochem I wondered if Pu 244 made by the rapid process could be detected on earth still! Sounds like it's not primordial though.
Pu244: Dad? SNR: No, but I knew your father. He was a Neutron Star and he met this little Black Hole from another spiral arm. Pu244: Were they happy together? SNR: It all started quite innocently but ended violently.
@@McSlobo Elements in the island of "stability" have half lives on the order of months to years; if they were produced in supernova or neutron star mergers or some other process there would be no chance of finding any today.
Is Pu 244 even dangerous though? With those low half-lifes I'm thinking it is about as dangerous as any particular rock. not that Pu-244 would arrive in an asteroid either. I would imagine it would be more like space dust that had been blasted by neutron radiation.
@@jannikheidemann3805 plutonium 244 cant go critical mass and nuclear chain reaction man, it most stable one. So the supernova blow those iron 60 and 244plutonium to earth like all other heavy element. 80millions halflife so maybe the Chixulub asteroid that wipe out the Dino bring the Plutonium 244 and iron 60 with it :))
Thanks for this really cool video! In addition to the humor (spicy rocks and garden variety supernovas, heh) it's a very entertaining and clear discussion of a scientific paper that teaches us something new. That kind of intelligent discussion is always rare on RU-vid and much appreciated.
"You can't create Plutonium 244 by accident". As an avid watcher of the Plainly Difficult channel i can attest to people being very creative when it comes to creating accidents involving nuclear materials.
Great video as always 👍 Just one question. If a neutron star merger created the plutonium and it was in the same layer of sediment as the iron, the merger must have taken place at about the same time as the other supernovae. Thing is, i thought that there could be a considerable amount of time between the creation of the binary neutron stars and their merger wich would mean that the normal supernovae and the merger don't have to take place at the same time. Either it was a coincidence or i am wrong about my asumption. I hope someone could clarify that for me, I admit that i am not one of the brightest out there 😅
Weirdly, you're the second person I've heard to mysteriously reference that quote without explaining its origin in the last few weeks. At least I feel clever now knowing what it's from the second time around. lol
@@Robert_McGarry_Poems Scott was making a joke by calling them ‘spicy rocks’, my comment was totally appropriate and comments don’t ‘break’ into anything.
Excellent walk-through of the difficulties one encounters when one is making heavy elements. And the trick is one needs lots of really high energy neutrons. I know I'll be so much more successful now!
Thanks for existing and for sharing your knowledge.. Man, you rock! does anyone know the name of this outromusic? I found it even cooler than Fatality but couldn't find the name anywhere...
Great video, i didnt think it was possible to check back so far in time ! Could this element time mapping be used to check for signs of the moon forming, or planet X passing ?
There have been natural nuclear reactors formed in the past (at Oklo, in West Africa...that's the only known site, but there could've been others that are unknown at present), where geological contingency created a situation in which U-235 could undergo a self-sustaining fission reaction (back then, U-235 made up over 3% of the atoms of all naturally-occuring uranium...this is basically exactly the enrichment level that is used at present in most nuclear reactors around the world). Groundwater served as the moderator there, and the slowed-down neutrons operated just like they do in real nuclear reactors, being captured by U-238, and turning into Pu-239. *_Scientists estimate that over 2 TONS of plutonium were generated there over the lifetime of 16 separate reactor phases._* Obviously, none of that plutonium remains today, since the half-life of Pu-239 is something like 24,000 years, and the last reactor at Oklo shut down 1.7 BILLION years ago (71,000 half-lives...it would take less than 100 half-lives to reduce 2 tons of Pu-239 to a single atom thereof), but because this reactor has been proven to exist, and operated under the constraints of the laws of physics, *_we know for a fact that plutonium is a naturally-occuring element._* And it's quite likely that there are other elements that were previously thought to only exist via human-made technology, that have been generated without human input. However, this does lead me to a somewhat deep question. *_Humans...are natural._* We came to exist via natural processes, and therefore, whatever we do is also natural. If a clever...trilobite or whatever found a lump of pitchblende at the bottom of the ocean, and moved it so that it was near other pitchblende, and a chain reaction commenced, it would be "natural." So why, when a bunch of clever humans who are intent on blowing Germans to smithereens (having known some Germans, I sympathize with this sentiment) do the same thing, we call it artificial?
Most of it, yes. But a half-life is not a firm expiration date, it's more like a best-before date. There was evidently so much Pu-244 being flung our way that some of it remained "fresh" on the way over.
Fascinating! We have "spicy rocks" here in Cornwall, whilst not as spicy as those that you discuss in this video, but our background radiation is apparently a little higher than some other places, and we have radon issues too. I shall use the term "spicy rocks" in future. Thank you Scott.
Scott turns the tables on us, talking about tiny stuff to the scale of 7g in the entire Earth and samples containing perhaps 10 atoms of interest. Still staggering!
Yet another video on a topic that I couldn't have told you a thing about before, yet the whole thing made sense and I now understand. Fantastic presentation/explanations as always! (And I too am going to borrow the term "spicy rocks")
Never figured that there could be non-radioactive (or extremely low radiation) plutonium.. edit: I guess that's where the idea of the stable island of very heavy isotopes, of normally unstable elements, comes from?
@@ReneSchickbauer it has been a while since my highschool physics.. But is it wrong to equate a long halflife (and as far as I remember, thus stability) with lower radiation?
Nah yea "low radiation" plutonium is still radioactive. It isn't entirely wrong to equate long half life with lower levels of radiation but the type of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma, neutron emission) the material density, transparency and overall quantity matters too. The idea of the Island of stability comes from the nuclear shell model and magic numbers (belive it or not thats what they called). Again this isn't entirely a new discovery I mean look up Przybylski's Star, that contains a load of unusual stuff and even plutonium amongs them.
A 60 Ma half life element should be relatively safe to handle. Unfortunately for the would be plutonium user the element is also a hideously toxic heavy metal too.
You finally went there at the end. Today, when I hear super heavy element, I think kilonova. There's some logic behind the concept that breaking up what is basically a kilometer-sized nucleus generates large nuclei. In a way, after you have smashed the gravitation that binds the whole thing together you end up with giant, hyper radioactive chunks.
I know you're probably burnt out on ksp, but I got an idea for you that would probably be fun and new. First off, sandbox is fine; This project will be so massive that it'll really just be a pain in the ass to do in career mode. Build a full colony using the MKS mod. It is very large and complex and designing full scale bases will certainly be a challenge. You can setup production lines that create spaceship parts and all kinds of stuff. There's practically no videos are tutorials on it, and I think this would be right up your alley.
Looks like the Periodic Table at 6:52 needs an update, then. Pretty much any sort-of-stable isotope ought to be found in those sediments, if you look hard enough.
That's 10 minutes & 40 seconds where I went into a trance and then when Scott said "Fly Safe." I came back to reality, listened to the outro and thought "What was that all about?" Physics was not my strongest subject at school.
Fast reactors can happily burn plutonium and the longer lived actinides. There is no need for expensive (and risky) molten metal coolants. We already have simple intrinsically safe designs waiting to go. The delay is entirely down to the glacial pace of regulatory oversight.
Dang, now I’ve got to look up the relative energy difference between colliding neutron stars and a standard super nova. I’m guessing it’s going to be a bit like an elephant versus a fly.
Looking at the neutron star animation, I'm now curious to know what the maximum fatal distance from such an event would be from gravitational energy alone. You would need a high enough frequency to produce a significant tidal force --- different parts of your body being pulled in different directions --- and enough amplitude to actually tear things apart. At low frequencies it would rip you limb from limb, but at high enough frequencies you'd end up with individual water molecules being broken. Somewhere inbetween you'd have proteins being denatured because they would be being stretched out of shape; this would need as much amplitude. I wonder if anyone's actually tried to calculate this...
Also the Aluminum isotopes with half lives of 70k-700k years that have also been found. Those are also 'nova" level energies needed to create them but would decay long before they reached us unless the one variable that's not being discussed is our own sun having a long period recurring micro-nova phase. Our star is no different but is always excluded from consideration for some reason.
@@scottmanley The context in my original comment is basically from the more recent depositions that find these isotopes along with micro spheres in black mat layers of sediment coinciding with mass extinction events and magnetic excursions that are less than 100k years ago. My thinking is they all go hand in hand if the sun had a rather angry moment or two.
