How many stars have contributed to producing the heavy elements in our solar system?

So far as I know, only one star has been singled out. About 100 million years before the solar nebula collapsed, a nearby supernova deposited radioactive aluminum-26 atoms into it. This isotope decays in only a few million years, and its traces can only now be found in the enhanced abundances of its more stable 'daughter' elements. This single event, probably did not deposit ALL of the heavy elements into the solar nebula, because we think that the element enrichment of the interstellar medium is a long process spanning billions of years, and requiring many supernova to do the job. However, when we look at distant young galaxies, we see that their element abundances are almost those of our Sun, and that this happened within a few billion years after the Big Bang. It only takes 10 million years to form a massive star and to have it detonate as a supernova, so in 1 billion years, you can have 100 supernova events pollute any given interstellar cloud. In our case, we do not know what elements it started with, and many supernova it took to cook them! There are no chemical 'tags' that can distinguish one supernova from another.


Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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