Comment on Someone help me make a 'transition metals' joke here...

• lledrtx@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Is that joke that on a cosmic level, it’s mostly hydrogen and helium (?) so others get ignored, like how genders other than the usual 2 get ignored? If so, that’s so smart and funny, wow.

  Or is it something else that I’m not getting?

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  • jamhandy@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Pretty much, the universe is hydrogen, helium, and rounding errors.

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  • Deconceptualist@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yep. Cosmologists work at the largest scale and often simplify regular matter down to hydrogen (“gas”) and everything else (“metal”).

    So if you ever see a reference to the “metallicity” of a star, that can include the presence of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc… which chemists of course would never refer to as metals.

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