Deuterium

So we'll park that one.

Deuterium is the star of today's show.

So what is deuterium? It's hydrogen with a neutron, just one neutron sitting alongside the proton in the nucleus.

Now, that might sound trivial, but because a neutron weighs roughly the same as a proton, that single neutron doubles the weight of the atom.

The atmosphere contains further clues about Venus' past too.

Precise measurements by the Venera and Vega probes, and especially NASA's Pioneer orbiter, reveal the peculiar observation that the Venusian atmosphere appears heavily enriched in deuterium.

Deuterium is a heavier isotope of hydrogen, so you find it in anything containing hydrogen, most notably within water, H2O.

On Earth, deuterium is pretty rare.

Only 3 out of every 20,000 hydrogen atoms are deuterium.

So let me break this down simply.

Deuterium is a heavy, what's called an isotope of hydrogen.

It's naturally present within water and within food and in small amounts is perfectly fine.

But when it accumulates inside of your cells, specifically in the mitochondria, It acts like mud that kind of mucks up the system.

His chart carried the position where no element existed, and he filled them anyway, describing what belonged there.

Deuterium, tritium, neptunium, plutonium, two isotopes of hydrogen and two transuranic elements.

Positioned in a chart copyrighted in 1926, none of them yet isolated by any laboratory on Earth.

Deuterium arrived in 1931.

Tritium followed.

Neptunium and Plutonium followed at the start of the 1940s.

Hydrogen nuclei form naturally since they are just individual protons.

Deuterium appeared when protons and neutrons stuck together.

Helium nuclei assembled from pairs of protons and pairs of neutrons.

Tiny amounts of lithium emerged from slightly more complex reactions.

protons and neutrons began combining into the lightest atomic nuclei.

Deuterium formed first, a nucleus containing one proton and one neutron, then helium-3, then helium-4, then trace amounts of lithium-7.

This process, called primordial nucleosynthesis, lasted only a few minutes before the expanding universe cooled below the temperature required to sustain fusion.

The window closed, the nuclear reactions stopped and the ratio of hydrogen to helium produced in those three minutes roughly 75 hydrogen and 25 helium by mass was locked in permanently this prediction is one of the most powerful confirmations of the big bang model when astronomers measure the chemical composition of the oldest most pristine gas clouds in the universe clouds that have never been enriched by stellar nucleosynthesis, they find exactly the ratio the Big Bang predicts.