About lithium!!

  About lithium!!

The phone you are reading this on right now is powered by a battery that is installed in your phone. Lithium is used in this battery. The batteries in more or less modern smartphones, tablets and laptops are lithium-ion batteries.

Lithium is a silvery looking metal. It is the third element of the periodic table. Which has three protons and three to four neutrons in its nucleus. While there are three electrons around it. This metal was discovered in 1817 by Johann August, a scientist from Sweden, among the minerals in the earth. Since then, its demand has gradually increased. By 2020, worldwide lithium consumption was about 56 thousand tons.

Today, it is most widely used in modern electronics and electric vehicles, i.e. electric cars.

But where did lithium come from?

This question asked the scientists

For many years it was dizzy.

The problem was not how lithium forms in stars. The problem was that all the lithium in the universe could not be extracted by all known methods. It only makes up about 20% of the total lithium in the universe.

How do we know this?

That it is 20 percent of the total lithium?

 Because we easily know how much lithium there is in the solar system in different asteroids and planets. So since we know how many stars in the universe are bigger than the sun or the sun, we can make a rough estimate of how much lithium there will be in the universe. From the rocks of lithium-rich asteroids, we know that there is about 1000 solar masses of lithium in our galaxy alone, and that much lithium could not have been made by the known methods of lithium formation.

What were these known methods?

1. The temperature of the universe was extremely high until a few minutes after the Big Bang. At this temperature, the protons present in many places undergo a fusion process, changing from hydrogen to helium. 25% of the total helium in the universe was formed like this.

 What is Beryllium?

 Beryllium is actually the element after lithium in the periodic table. It has four protons in its nucleus. However, the beryllium formed after the Big Bang was not an ordinary atom of beryllium, but an isotope of beryllium. An isotope of an element has the same number of protons as a simple atom of that atom, but it also has extra neutrons. The beryllium-7 isotope also has 4 protons in its nucleus, but it also has three additional neutrons.

So at the beginning of the Big Bang, beryllium.7 atoms were formed in large numbers. which later decomposed into lithium.

This is the first way to do it though

The total amount of lithium is only 8% of the total lithium in the universe.

 2. What is the other method?

Various stars and black holes in the universe are emitting powerful energy and nuclear particles that travel at more or less the speed of light, which we call cosmic rays. They also fall to Earth by the trillions every day.

When these energetic high-speed collisions collide with atoms of heavier elements, they are likely to break them up into many lighter elements. In which lithium atoms are also included. However, very little lithium is formed in this way, making up a tiny fraction of the total lithium in the universe.

: 3. What is the third method?

When planets like the Sun are nearing their end, they become red giants, meaning they become slightly cooler and many times their mass. In this case, the fusion process in the core of such stars can produce atoms of beryllium-7.

which later decay to form lithium atoms. However, lithium is a fragile metal and is destroyed at extreme temperatures in the cores of stars

(This is why normal stars can't form or accumulate like helium, carbon or oxygen, and why I've been explaining so many methods for so long :) )

 However, these red giant stars undergo a special process in which the material in their cores gradually falls into their upper layers, which are slightly cooler, and when these stars reach their end, the lithium vacuum on their outer surface. This is the third method. 10% of lithium can also be made in this way.

So where did the remaining 80 percent of helium come from?

This was the question that puzzled scientists for decades. However, in 2020, this issue was also resolved.

 Where and how was the remaining 80% of the universe's lithium formed?

: The answer is very interesting which tells us that the universe is nothing less than a wonder in the world of possibilities.

Our sun is the only star in the solar system, but there are many such stars in the universe which are not alone and another star also revolves around them. That is, two stars revolve around each other. They are called binary stars.

These stars may be Sun-like or larger than the Sun. One of them may be as big as or slightly bigger than the Sun and the other may be many times bigger than the Sun.

When one of them is somewhat larger than the sun and the other is several times larger than it, then as mentioned above, at the end of a star like the sun, this

become red giants. These red giants then turn into white dwarf stars after a few billion years.

These are very dirty stars in which the process of fusion has stopped.

 The core of such stars is filled with oxygen and carbon atoms.

However, if there is another star near these stars, as in the binary star system mentioned above, it starts to "steal" material(s) from the other star with the help of gravity, i.e. the material of the other star orbiting it reaches it and When this material accumulates to a certain amount, the process of fusion starts again on its upper surface, forming several elements, including beryllium. And then this beryllium is scattered into space by a nova explosion at the end of the star. Remember that beryllium decays into lithium as mentioned above.

 In this regard, when scientists observed novae exploding in such binary systems with astronomical telescopes on Earth, they found evidence of beryllium and lithium in them. So this is the likely way in which the remaining 80% of the universe's lithium was formed

 However, we still do not fully understand the source of lithium and how it forms in stars, and this may be due to the incompleteness of our scientific models of the formation of elements in different types of stars. In this regard, there is a lot of research going on in the world of astronomy today, and if anyone is interested in doing more research on it and unlocking the secrets of the universe, then Bismillah.

It is possible that by fully understanding this problem, we can improve the theories of basic physics, learn more about dark matter and dark energy, and improve the current standard model of understanding the atom to create a fundamental cosmological theory that science can use. Fulfill the centuries-old dream of Einstein's dream of combining relativity and quantum mechanics.