Question

What is the life story of a proton from its formation shortly after the big bangto its presence in the nucleus of an oxygen atom you have just inhaled?

Answer 1

NOTE - Some Reference has been taken from NASA's website

After Big bang, first things to come into existence were the elementary particles like quarks and electrons, Then Within a few minutes of the Big Bang the universe had cooled enough for the free protons and neutrons to start combining into deuterium and helium. These protons were moving at great speeds and collided with anti-protons and destoryed each other.

Luckily, In this process some protons out of miilions survive and continued to move on. As they moved through the universe, they were attracted towards gas climps floating around due to gravitational attraction. This process continued and more and more protons started coming. This led to formation of proto galaxy. The dense clouds of hydrogen and helium begin to collapse under their own mass to form protostars. As they collapsed they heated up until their cores were hot enough for nuclear fusion to begin and for the star to be born.

However,proton spent its time in the star’s outer atmosphere, far from the stellar core where fusion takes place. These first generation stars were massive and evolved very rapidly, fusing heavier and heavier elements in their cores until eventually they exploded as supernovae, ejecting not only their atmospheres but also their cores out into space, In the cooler environment of the cloud the proton pairs up with an electron to form a hydrogen atom, which then pairs up with a similar atom to form a hydrogen molecule.

Thisproton floats around for a while before becoming part of yet another molecular cloud. Here it joins up with another hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom to form a water molecule the building blocks of the planets. Some water molecules end up in the minerals making up these rocks, while other form clumps of ice which eventually go to form the outer planets and their moons.