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\n Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all. <\/p>\n
All across the Universe, stars are dying through a variety of means. They can directly collapse to a black hole, they can become core-collapse supernovae, they can be torn apart by tidal cataclysms, they can be subsumed by other, larger stars, or they can die gently, as our Sun will, by blowing off their outer layers in a planetary nebula while their cores contract down to form a degenerate white dwarf. All of the forms of stellar death help enrich the Universe, adding new atoms, isotopes, and even molecules to the interstellar medium: ingredients that will participate in subsequent generations of star-formation.<\/p>\n
For a long time, however, we\u2019d made assumptions about where certain species of particles will and won\u2019t form, and what types of environments they could and couldn\u2019t exist in. Those assumptions were way ahead of where the observations were, however, and as our telescopic and technological capabilities catch up, sometimes what we find surprises us<\/a>. Sometimes, we find elements in places that we didn\u2019t anticipate, leading us to question our theoretical models for how those elements can be made. Other times, we find molecules in environments that we think shouldn\u2019t be able to support them, causing us to go back to the drawing board to account for their existence.<\/p>\n Check out our SoundCloud for direct downloads of this (and all<\/a>) episodes: https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/ethan-siegel-172073460\/starts-with-a-bang-124-astrochemistry<\/a><\/p>\n