A Love Letter from Texas Scientists to the Periodic Table

March 7, 2019 • by Marc Airhart

We're celebrating the 150th anniversary of the periodic table. Join us as we tour the cosmos, from the microscopic to the telescopic, with four scientists studying the role of four elements—zinc, oxygen, palladium and gold—in life, the universe and everything.

A series of cupcakes arranged to look like the periodic table

Emily Que is a chemist who helped capture, for the first time on video, zinc fireworks that burst from an egg when it's fertilized by sperm. Astronomer Michael Endl is searching for chemical signs of life in the atmospheres of exoplanets. Kate Biberdorf (a.k.a. Kate the Chemist) found new ways to speed up chemical reactions using palladium. And physicist Aaron Zimmerman explains why the gold in your jewelry was probably forged in an ultraviolent explosion billions of years ago.

A version of the periodic table of elements indicating how the elements were created

Origin of the Elements in the Solar System by Jennifer Johnson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Initial information on the Periodic Table color-coded by stellar origin can be found in this blog post: http://blog.sdss.org/2017/01/09/origin-of-the-elements-in-the-solar-system/

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Illustration of the Wolf 1130ABC triple system, composed of the red dwarf star Wolf 1130A, its close and compact white dwarf companion Wolf 1130B, and the distant brown dwarf tertiary Wolf 1130C. The three components of this system are shown scaled to their relative sizes. Image credit: Adam Burgasser, UCSD.

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A photo of the dark night sky above greenhouses in West Texas.

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The background shows the blackness of space, dotted with colorful stars and galaxies. In a pullout box at the top left, an arrow points to a fuzzy red blob shaped like a jelly bean. A label reads JADES-GS-z14-0.

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