Sol Lucet Omnibus - ESO

Tijana Prodanovic
Born in Novi Sad, Serbia
Biography
Tijana was born in Novi Sad on 14 December 1978. She first became interested in astronomy at
the tender age of ten, and wanting to know about the Universe has stayed with her ever since. In
2001 Tijana graduated with a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics from the University of Belgrade,
Serbia, and in the same year enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
where she was awarded a PhD in astrophysics in 2006. Tijana then returned to Serbia and her
hometown of Novi Sad, where she is now the assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics
at the University of Novi Sad. Her scientific research is focused primarily on the nucleosynthesis
of light elements, which are crucial in cosmology, and cosmic-ray and gamma-ray astronomy.
Besides scientific work, Tijana is also dedicated to teaching and bringing modern methods to
classrooms at the University of Novi Sad and Serbia in general. During her graduate studies in
the USA she was twice awarded the Excellent Teachers Award. Moreover, in 2008, Tijana won
the national, and came second in the international, FameLab competition for the best science
communicator, organised by the British Council. Tijana is also very active in public outreach. She
regularly gives popular public lectures in astronomy and is a Chair of the Scientific Committee of
Novi Sad Astronomical Society.
Physics Department, Faculty of Science, University of Novi Sad
The Physics Department of the Faculty of Science, University of Novi Sad, consists of five
major research groups: nuclear physics, experimental condensed matter physics, electronics,
theoretical physics and a general physics group. Scientific research areas covered by these five
groups are nuclear physics, plasma physics, X-ray crystal structure analysis, and theoretical
and experimental condensed matter physics. Moreover, some important research is also done
in the fields of astrophysics and medical physics. Undergraduate degrees offered within this
department are physics, astronomy-astrophysics, meteorology, medical physics and optometry.
Available postgraduate studies are in the fields of plasma physics, nuclear physics, condensed
matter and the physics of materials.
www.uns.ac.rs
The Great Universal Cookout
The Origin of the Elements
Making chemicals in the Universe
is almost like following a recipe,
and this is the theme of this feature
written by Tijana Prodanovic.
Condensing quarks, getting the
right temperature for protons and
then cooking up elements are all
covered. Everything has to be just
right to get high quality results and
the timings have to be spot on,
otherwise you may end up with
some very unexpected results...
u
d
u
Protons are made up from different types of quarks.
Say you want to make pancakes, but are missing all the key ingredients.
What do you do? You go grocery shopping of course! But have you ever
wondered about those groceries? How did they get there? How were they
made? Well, that’s one question I think about a lot — how did we get the
ingredients for the ingredients? How did we get all the nice chemical
elements like the H in the H O essential for every living thing, like the O in
2
the O we breathe, like lithium in our long-lived lithium batteries? And not
2
just that, but also the questions like why hydrogen is so cheap when it’s so
essential for our survival, and gold so expensive when it’s just bling? And
I’m not talking about chemistry here. I’m talking about pure and very cool
astrophysics at work — the great Universal cookout!
Recipes for astronomers
There are two main recipes for making chemical elements in the Universe.
One can be found at the very beginning, what we call the Big Bang — the
birth of our Universe. Some 13 billion years ago, just a tiny fraction of a
second after the Big Bang, the Universe was an unpleasant newborn. It was
an extremely dense and hot place, worse than the centre of the Sun. But it
was growing, fast, and because of that it was cooling, becoming less and
less dense. There’s much we still don’t know about the very first moments,
but we believe that it was all just highly concentrated energy mixed with
the most fundamental, indivisible particles — quarks and leptons.
In a millionth fraction of a second after the Big Bang, quarks started sticking
together to make protons — the essence of the most abundant element in
the Universe — hydrogen. A proton is a positively charged particle that is a
“naked” version of hydrogen, that is, the nucleus of the hydrogen atom, and
when you add an electron, an indivisible, negatively charged particle, and
let it bond with this proton, you get a hydrogen atom.
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