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 relatively common element, being around 3% of Earth’s crust (while of the human body, around 1.3% is calcium). Most if has been created as a part of the silicon-burning process; when a star has fused up much of the lighter elements in it, leaving mostly silicon. Though it’s not silicon itself that is fused straight into calcium. Rather silicon fuses with an alpha particle (that is; helium) and forms sulfur and sulfur fuses with an alpha particle and forms argon and argon fuses with an alpha particle and forms calcium. Subsequently, that’s also the order of their abundance in the universe; silicon is more common than sulfur which is more common than argon which is more common than calcium.
To fuse calcium requires so much concentrated energy that the human body can not do it, nor can it fuse or split any element at all. We get all the calcium in our body from our food (or, in gestation, from our parent’s blood). It’s typically not as free calcium that our body can instantly use, rather it’s as e.g. calcium salts, which our body digests.
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