this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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Science Memes

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Maybe not nursery rhimes about balloons (swg-empire.de)
submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Did I miss something in school? Plenty of things heavier than helium aren’t metal. Boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon…

[–] [email protected] 58 points 6 days ago (1 children)

In astronomy, nearly everything is hydrogen or helium. Like, over 98% of all matter is H or He. So it's very useful to be able to talk about H, He, and "everything else". They call that everything else "metals".

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Some stellar atmosphere models also add "alpha", which provides an extra knob for the abundance of alpha-capture elements. If you need anything more than that, you're doing some niche astrophysics.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Alpha being the elements up to iron?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

Elements formed by alpha capture. Since alpha particles have 2 protons, it's generally elements with an even number of protons.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Not for astrophysicists. They call basically everything a "metal". Of course they know it's wrong. But they keep doing it to annoy the chemists, I think.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

We also label things as prime to trick mathematicians into thinking a derivative has occurred