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 an element. The heavier an element the more energetic a fusion event is required in order to make it.
Hydrogen was the only element to begin with, but hydrogen can be smashed together in the core of stars to make helium, helium can make lithium etc up to iron.
But iron takes more energy to make than is released when the elements that make it smash together, so something more violent has to happen in order to make heavier elements.
In a supernova there is a lot of energy, enough energy to fuse elements into heavier forms. For the heaviest elements, even supernova aren’t energetic enough, it takes the collision of stars or star remnants to make them.
And since most of the calcium and other heavier elements on earth have been there since it formed, and it formed soon after the sun, and the sun hasn’t gone supernova, we know that these heavy elements must have been formed by older stars that died before the sun was born.
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