- [Woman Singing] Fact of the Day...
- [Man] Fact of the Day.
- Hello, hi, and welcome
to Fact of the Day with me.
We are made of stars.
The stuff that makes
us came from the stars.
The calcium that's in our bones,
the iron that makes up our blood,
the carbon that forms the backbone
of our very DNA.
This is all stuff that
is cooked up in stars,
in a process called Nucleosynthesis.
Now heavier elements,
like gold and uranium and platinum,
these things are made up in
a slightly separate process.
So for them you need a much
more energetic environment.
Like colliding neutron stars,
or huge massive supernovas to
help create these elements.
Another theory has just come to light
as to how those elements are created.
And this theory states
that primordial black holes
merged with neutron stars,
in order to create these elements.
When we talk about primordial black holes,
they're not the remnants of stars.
These are primordial black holes
from the very beginning of the universe.
30.7 billion years ago,
when we thought the Big Bang occurred,
these primordial black holes were created.
And they're tiny.
Like tiny.
As in a primordial black
hole is the size of an atom.
I don't know why I'm doing that,
because that's not even
as small as an atom.
An atom! That's how small it is.
You can think of a neutron star
being the size of a city
and the primordial black hole
being the size of an atom.
That's the ratio we're talking about.
And with any primordial black holes,
you've got 44 quintillion pounds of matter
crushed into the size of an atom.
So what happens in a neutron star
attracts, sucks in, the
primordial black hole.
It goes into the centre
of the neutron star
and it slowly devours
it from the inside out.
And then towards the end
of the neutron star's life,
as a result of this,
it ejects this stuff called
"core neutron matter"
and this decompresses, it heats up,
and it make the heavier elements,
like gold, and platinum, and uranium.
And that's where these heavier
elements are coming from.
So primordial black holes,
tiny, tiny black holes,
sucked into the core of a neutron star,
devouring it from the inside out,
to make these heavier elements.
That is, we are made from stars.
Thanks so much for watching.
Love you, bye.
Love you, bye.
Love you, bye.
