Energy source and carbon of animals and plants??

Question

What is the source of energy and carbon of animals and plants?

Answer 1

Ultimately, One Could Say CO2 and Radiation (In Particular, Some Wavelengths of Light), But I don't Think this is What you Mean, Aside From Processes of Directly Fixing CO2 or Making Use of Some Other Carbon and/or Energy Source (e. g. Succinate-Ammonia Media, In Bacteriology), Glucose.

Answer 2

The source of most energy for all life on earth is the sun (photosynthetic). Scientists once believed that without sunlight, life could not exist.

But then we began exploring deep sea vents. Miles beneath the surface, where the light and heat from the sun never reaches, life was thriving, deriving its energy from the chemicals and heat spewing out of the belly of the earth. Here, the water is near boiling hot, acidic, and the chemicals coming from the vents would be highly poisonous to nearly any other life form. These life forms are chemosynthetic, and were previously unknown.

Other chemosynthetic life forms are found around frozen methane hydrate deposits on the ocean floor. Here, life derives its energy from synthesis of the methane trapped in these deposits, instead of the chemicals and heat from oceanic vents.

I think it is facsinating that life is so tenacious. If we can find vast ecosystems like this in such unlikely places on earth, then why not on one of Jupiter's moons? Perhaps we will even find life that is not carbon-based. Or life that has somehow evolved to synthesis energy from the vast radiation given off by Jupiter.

Anyway, I'm not sure what you mean when you ask where the carbon comes from. How animals and plants use it as a building block, or how carbon is manufactured? I will assume the latter.

Carbon is formed in the core of stars. Our sun, for example, is presently fusing hydrogen into helium. The heat from this reaction keeps the sun expanded. When the level of hydrogen in the sun has been depleted, the sun will no longer be able to sustain hydrogen fusion, it will cool off, and then start to collapse. As the left over helium atoms become squeezed together, it will get hot again, and the helium atoms will begin to fuse together. This fusion of helium atoms creates carbon. This Red Giant Phase is a much hotter reaction, and the sun will expand so large that it will engulf the planets all the way out to Uranus. Because of the great surface area, this heat will be lost, the sun will cool, and shrink again, but a large part of the outer layers will not manage to follow the outer layers of the sun as it shrinks, and will be left in space, floating around as a gas cloud. The sun will lose up to 80% of its mass from this cycle of expanding and contracting. When the helium runs out, all of the carbon atoms left over will then be squeezed together, forming a white dwarf. In stars that are much larger than the sun, the pressure on these carbon atoms is so great that the carbon will begin to fuse into iron, and iron into other elements. When this fusion cannot continue, it will cool off again, and collapse either into a neutron star or a black hole. Either of these collapses releases a huge amount of energy. The outer layers will not be able to stay with the collapsing core, and this outer layer will be ejected into space by an unimaginably huge explosion. Some of the materials in the outer shell will be further fused by the force of the explosion which ejects them into space. All of the heaviest elements that we know of are created through this event. When the shock wave reaches the gas cloud of helium that was left in space from the red giant phase, much of it is also fused into carbon, and it continues riding the shock wave into space, where it eventually cools off and coalesces with other materials to form new planets, asteroids, or comets.