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I think that all the elements present in the solar system that are heavier than hydrogen were made by previous stars and elements heavier that iron (or carbon I forget) were necessary made by stars that went supernova.

It would be very surprising if all these stars were not surrounded by rocky planets who themselves had volcanism and thus a process of rock creation.



Technically speaking big bang nucleosynthesis/baryogensis produced elements as heavy as lithium with some abundance, but yeah still dominated by hydrogen (and whatever other exotic non-baryonic .... stuff is out there)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryogenesis

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis

Also, this is a great image showing the proportions of elements based on source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element#/media/File:N...


That’s one of the cooler charts I’ve ever seen thanks for sharing. It’s wild that elements from merging neutron stars like iridium and uranium could even find us here. Sends home how old the universe is.


Find us here? Our solar system was created far far away from here. All the stuff that makes up our solar system was created by far older stars that long ago exploded and threw their material into space. Eventually some of that material coalesced into our Galaxy and our sun and planets.


So neutron stars collisions are actually responsible for a huge chunk of the elements in the periodic table!? Mind blowing.

How did they end up on the solar system after that? What we've got is just the material ejected when such cataclysmic collisions happen?


Do you have any books you could recommend on this subject?


It's not the sole focus of the book, but I recall "A Universe From Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss mentioning it a couple of times, particularly in the case that only that set of elements in exactly those proportions leads to the Big Bang as the primary theory of how it all began.


"The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet" by Robert M. Hazen has a chapter about genesis of elements ( big bang, star formation, supernovae, planet formation, etc).


Or neutron stars colliding


Iron. See iron peak




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