Nuclear chemistry nucleosynthesis

An entirely different kind of chemistry sub-discipline is nuclear chemistry. It deals with chemicals all right, but its concern is quite different from all the sub-disciplines mentioned above. It studies the nuclei of atoms in chemicals. The nuclei obey quite different kinds of rules than the ordinary chemicals do, as the next Chap. (19) explains. It treats the radioactivity, nucleosynthesis (how elements are produced), nuclear fission and fusion, and extends to cosmochemistry. 

A few informative properties of life come from easy category distinctions, such as the fact that all known life makes essential use of carbon and carbon-oxygen-nitrogen molecules in liquid water solution. The seemingly trivial observation that such carbaquist chemistry is ruled out if astrophysical carbon abundance lies below a certain threshold enabled Hoyle [1] to predict the 7.6 MeV carbon-12 ( C) nuclear resonance with remarkable precision because the discovery of the triple-alpha reaction synthesis of in stars happens to be a bottleneck for stellar nucleosynthesis of all the heavy elements. The pragmatic information in this prediction is easy to measure because it guided experimental characterization of nuclear structure where the existing computational capabilities could not. Similar sensitive dependence of the physical state of water has been used to define a habitable zone in planetary physics [10], which is not predictive in the same sense as carbon abundance (we already knew where the earth s orbit lies), but which creates a useful filter in the search for extraterrestrial life. 

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