|
The Abundance
of Elements in the Solar System
Author:
Michael Colebrook
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The relative abundance of the
chemical elements in the solar system is shown in the following graph.
The horizontal scale is the atomic number, from 1 for Hydrogen (H) to 92 for Uranium (U). The vertical axis is on a logarithmic scale, each interval represents a 10-fold increase in abundance. The scale has been normalised to an abundance of 106 for Silicon (Si). The graph shows that Hydrogen is more than 1,000,000,000,000 times as abundant as Uranium. It also shows that elements with even atomic numbers tend to be more abundant than those with odd atomic numbers. This is believed to be due to differences in the stability of atomic nuclei with even and odd numbers of protons. Reference |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||