this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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The Periodic Table according to astronomers (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 21 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 21 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Physicists are notorious for approximating, and astronomers are even worse. But there are some subfields where they care about being more precise, and you maybe break the periodic table into a handful of elements plus alphas. And there's that one or two people getting exquisite spectral resolution and signal-to-noise on a few stars and measuring the abundance of Technetium or whatever.

[โ€“] [email protected] 19 points 18 hours ago

It's why I fucking love astrophysics. There's so much handwaving because so much information is observed.

But without the handwaving you can't find crazy ass things like nuclear fusion being behind the power of stars. You find these really big numbers everywhere that make the "normal stuff" negligible.

It not that the precision isn't important, it's just not always relevant at particular scales, like the scale of space.