Science
Related: About this forumWe are star dust.
My question is, from how many different stars?
Any thoughts?
catnhatnh
(8,976 posts)lastlib
(23,266 posts)We are golden,
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden!
catnhatnh
(8,976 posts)Galileo126
(2,016 posts)from a nearby supernova. Which is why we have heavy elements such as uranium on earth. Elements heavier than iron can only be created in a supernova explosion.
Three cheers for osmium!
lastlib
(23,266 posts)(I wouldn't cheer for them ever.)
jakeXT
(10,575 posts)Cosmic collisions spin stellar corpses into gold
Rumpelstiltskin would be jealous. A recently observed flash in the distant universe suggests that smacking two dense, dead stars together can create gold in vast amounts with a mass 10 times that of the moon. The finding may help settle a debate about whether colliding stars or supernovae are the main sources of heavy metals in the universe.
"We see a signature that we interpret as the production of very heavy elements gold, platinum, lead exactly the kind of material whose origin was unclear," says Edo Berger of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
After the big bang, the universe contained only hydrogen, helium and lithium. Most of the other elements are built up in the cores of massive stars, and released when stars die. But stars lack the energy and the spare neutrons to be able to forge elements heavier than iron.
One idea often put forward to explain how such elements are made is that supernovae explosions of massive stars produce a powerful, fast-moving wind of freed neutrons and protons, which can convert lighter atomic nuclei released during the explosion into those of heavier elements.
But computer simulations of the process did not always produce the proportions seen in nature of certain elements. Some researchers suggested that neutron stars, the dense balls of mostly neutrons that are left over after a supernova, could build heavy elements more efficiently when they collide.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23886-cosmic-collisions-spin-stellar-corpses-into-gold.html#.VH9tYcn4InH
AlbertCat
(17,505 posts)..... than the number of cows in a Big Mac.
greiner3
(5,214 posts)How many consecutive stars were needed to achieve our present star?
To clarify, the first stars after the big bang were on a scale that can't be supported in the present universe's size and explode very soon after their formation.
VY Canis Majoris, the largest observable star, would only last some millions of years before it exploded and its remnants would create several systems with huge, but smaller stars.
These huge stars would then take many more millions of years to explode until the last one exploded and formed our Sun.
Could it be extrapolated using our Sun's age at just over 4 billion years the size of a huge sun's mass to create our system and possibly other systems, or is that too much to understand at our present technology?