Isotopes in the cosmos
I mentioned the basics of isotopes and why they are useful in our lives in a previous post. Here I wanted to talk about why isotopes matter in the Universe. We usually ask questions like “How are the elements created in stars?” or “What is the origin of heavy elements in the Universe?” or “How do stars make gold?". These are all great questions, but in reality things are a bit more complicated than they appear. The complication is that each of the elements can have many stabl