How can you trace minerals from supernovas to our teeth and bones? Isn’t the calcium that make up our bones produced during our gestation? How is that connected to a supernova from potentially millions of years ago?
In: Biology
Calcium is a chemical element. The kind of things that happen in your body can bind calcium to other elements or and tear it away from them, but cannot create or destroy it. Therefore, all the calcium that’s currently in your body came from somewhere else. As an adult, you eat foods that contain calcium, and your body separates the calcium out and puts it to use. As a baby, your mother’s body did the digesting for you, and you got your calcium from her. These are all facts that scientists have observed repeatedly and proven exhaustively.
The remaining question then is, where did calcium come from originally? The only ways we have found to create elements are nuclear processes like radioactivity or fusion. The nuclear processes we have discovered which could create significant amounts of calcium are things that will only occur naturally as part of a nova or supernova. Therefore, by process of elimination, our best theory is that all the calcium we see must have been created by exploding stars.
Which stars exploded to make the calcium we have? How did that calcium get from there to here? How long did that take? We don’t know, not with any certainty. But we don’t know of any other way that our calcium could have been created. Perhaps we will learn of a new way to synthesize elements in the future, and our theory about our calcium coming from supernovae will be challenged. But until then, the supernova origin story, ridiculous as it sounds, is the most likely explanation we have found.
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