The scale of time in fields like astrophysics and geology never ceases to amaze me. When I saw freshly made, I thought it was recently created. Turns out it dropped on earth some time in the last 10 million years.
They just have a very different take on some things, because their way of looking at the universe is different from how we look at earth.
The electronic structure of an element greatly influences its chemical behavior, so elements in the same group tend to be chemically similar. However, hydrogen is a bit of an odd-ball as group 1 elements go.
Sure, the table has mostly metals but there are a lot of gases.
So, really hydrogen, helium, and everything else is a perfectly reasonable classification as everything else acts the same outside of fusion.
At low pressures, it looks like as little as 15 Kelvin is enough to make Neon a gas.
I think it would be “absurd” for astronomers to change this because people who aren’t scientists get confused.
The reason astronomers use “metallicity” this way is largely historical: (chemical) metals are not as prevalent in stars as non-metallic elements like carbon and nitrogen, but they are much easier to detect in spectral analysis. So historically the “metallicity” of a star really did refer to the heavy metal content (generally Fe), and considering the physical processes involved it’s not unreasonable to extend this to all non-H/He elements in the star. I think it would be “absurd” for astronomers to change this because people who aren’t scientists get confused.
My bad yo. Please accept my humble apology in not knowing the historical signifacance of something. I'll be doing my masters in 2022/23, biochemistry/microbiology.
I really should have been a bird watcher instead.
Who cares about plant proteins anyway? That's not science at all.
Maybe metal was not the best word for that, but having word for "all elements except hydrogen and helium" is useful in astronomy
Astronomers presumably mostly think about matter in the form of a star, in which presumably all the hydrogen and helium would be in some sort of plasma state, and perhaps all the “metals” would be too.
There is a nice curious droid video on the topic whether a humans if they went extinct tomorrow, wouldn't create a fossil record similar to dinosaurs, simply because we've been on planet earth for a too short period. https://youtu.be/8xDK2LgSeyk
> What we have to remember is that they existed for over 165 million years, 3300 times longer than modern humans have been around and the number of creatures that lived in that time frame alone, not including very small insect-sized ones must be in the trillions. However, only a tiny number of those would have been in the right conditions to be quickly covered in sediment and then fossilized. Then millions of years later they happen to be exposed on the surface at just the right time before they are eroded away for us to find them. The latest estimate is that the total number of modern humans to have ever existed over the 50,000 years we have been around is about 107 billion. But 50,000 years is a very small slice of geological time and all of our 5000 years of recorded history would be a fraction of that, and the last 200 years or so since the industrial revolution, a tiny fraction of that again, maybe a razor-thin sliver of a darkened layer somewhere in the dozens of kilometers of limestone, siltstone, and shale of the future earth's crust. Depending on where we look, there are gaps covering millions of years in the fossil records, if we were to slip into one of those, we too would be lost in time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
Granted it is just a hypothesis but it is an interesting idea.
Jargon will always exist.