The Big Bang and Hydrogen

 

The progress of evolution from the Big Bang to the present…

 

I’ve got a project coming up in a few weeks that involves learning more about the conditions under which life might form throughout the universe. So, I’m busily studying various papers and articles so that when I get to one of the meetings involved with the project, I’ll be able to ask some intelligent questions.

There are so many factors that can play a role in the formation of life that I could spend dozens of blog entries talking about them. One of the most important sciences we can study to suss out the role elements play in the cycle of life is chemistry. Which is, of course, the study of the elements that make everything the universe, and how they work together to do so.

The typical study of chemistry starts with a student learning the chemical elements, starting with hydrogen, shown here as an atom with probable locations of its single electron. Why hydrogen? Because it was the first element created in the Big Bang, the creation event thatstarted the universe on its evolutionary journey some 13.7 billion years ago. The second element was helium, followed by lithium. All the rest of the elements depend on some sort of action that takes place inside stars, or at the end of a star’s life. And, those elements, along with hydrogen— a star’s first “food”— play a huge role in shaping how new generations of stars—and planets (and us) — are formed.

Hydrogen, however, is ubiquitous, which is a fancy word meaning that it’s everywhere. And, it was all there was in the early universe to feed the first rounds of starbirth, and thereafter nourish the formation of more stars. Those stars consumed hydrogen in their nuclear furnaces for much of their lives, but also created new elements as they went along, using their fuel to do so. When they died, they spit back into space all the elements they’ve made, along whatever hydrogen they have left. All that stuff becomes the seed material for MORE stars, and whatever planets those stars form. It’s going on today, this chain of starbirth and stardeath, using hydrogen as the formative “star food” and then churning out heavier elements at the other end of the stellar life cycle. So, like babies that survive on mother’s milk early in life, but turn to other foods later to grow and thrive, the universe continues its reliance on hydrogen for the early phases of star life, creating the heavy elements needed for later phases where more metal-enriched stars, planets… and life… are formed.

So, hydrogen is everywhere, even in you! How so? To paraphrase a life form that once spoke in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we are “bags of mostly water.” Water molecules are made of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen.

So, think about THAT the next time you’re out under the stars. You have hydrogen to thank for your existence… the mother’s milk of the cosmos.