Toad4242

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Nucleosynthesis

I have a proposal that I'd like to discuss. If the community agrees with this proposal, I'm happy to do the work or not as people see fit.

What I'm proposing is that articles about elements should, in their stat block at the top of the article, include stats and links about that element's nucleosynthesis, to explain where the element comes from. The source of an element is as essential a piece of information as its atomic number or other characteristics, since it explains where all of these other characteristics came from. I spent an hour and a half today hopping from article to article trying to track this down for the element copper, and it was not nearly easy enough to find for something so essential.

Wikipedia has excellent articles on nucleosynthesis in general, and it has this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis#mediaviewer/File:Nucleosynthesis_periodic_table.svg) table, which is very helpful, but what's missing is an expansion of the story of each element specifically. For example, copper is shown in the table as coming from "Large Stars," and Wikipedia has a useful article about the s-process involved, the linkage between the two is missing, as is any direct linkage between the article about Copper, the article about the s-process, and that table. I had to search off Wikipedia to document the connection, which I did thanks to this (http://kencroswell.com/Copper.html) page. Ken Croswell's article about the nucleosynthesis of copper is excellent

Ideally, each element should have some reference to its nucleosynthesis in its stat block, and should include either a section in the article or a page called "Nucleosynthesis of Copper" (for example) that puts what's known about it into words. All these element pages should be linked together by category pages for each nucleosynthesis process, e.g., the Copper page should be referenced in a category page called s-process Elements, along with all the other elements nucleosynthesized by the s-process, and so on.

Wikipedia's articles about nucleosynthesis include some helpful diagrams that illustrate the "genealogy" if you will of selected elements. Each element should have this treatment, including a diagram that shows its complete pedigree from hydrogen and lists the processes involved. This should be done in a way that exposes the cosmic perspective, not just the chemistry, so anyone looking at the copper coating of a modern U.S. penny, for example, can be inspired to think about the astonishing cosmic events - big bang and stellar births and deaths - that had to take place for this humble penny to exist - and thence to appreciate also our own remarkable pedigree.

This overhaul of the format and content of each element page, creation of category pages, and cross-linking would be a moderately sized project up front, but since our understanding of the elements is so relatively stable compared to other subjects, it would be unlikely to impose much of a maintenance burden going forward after its initial completion.

How does the community feel about a project like this?

This is my first time seriously proposing a change to Wikipedia, so I apologize for any errors in protocol I might be making.

Toad4242 (talk) 22:49, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Your project is one I've been going to do for some time (thus i highly encourage your efforts), but it's a added paragraph for most of our elements, and is some work. Some of this has been done. Look at deuterium, helium or even nickel and you'll see a nucleosynthesis/cosmogenesis section, usually in the isotopes section. In other articles, it begins the "occurrence" section as "cosmic occurrence," where we discuss Milky Way and crustal abundance before minerals and ores.

A lot more is known about nucleosynthesis than was known in the B^2FH times, but there are good summaries, and the the one I was planning to use was a summary paper used to generate a table in McSween and Huss' text Cosmochemistry pp. 104-108. It has cosmic origins for elements and processes taken from Anders and Gravisse, 1989. Abundances of the elements: meteoric and solar. Geochemica et. Cosmochemica Acta 53, 197-214.

Once something like this table is available, it needs to go in the appendix as embedded list in the articles on nucleosynthesis, and the same table with origins should complete the set of stable nuclides. If you get a monograph on nucleosynthesis of the range of isotopes of some element, as you occasionally do, you can use it to flesh out the main article on isotopes of xxxx which we have for each element. Then a paragraph or so of that can go in the late "isotopes" or early "occurrence" sections of element articles that don't have them now. And yes, the infobox has room enough for and R or S or one over the other (Rs) or letters for the few other processes that we know of (light element burning or fusion, big bang, spallation, explosive synthesis, etc).

So go for it. You'll probably see my steps occasionally where I've used the source above to tag elemental sources. SBHarris 23:14, 11 November 2014 (UTC)