If heavier elements need to be formed in stars bigger than our sun, there must have been at least another star in this region of space before our solar system formed, right? What was there? Do we know anything about it?
In: Physics
Important thing to remember- all the stars are moving. They’re orbiting the centre of the galaxy in different paths and a different speeds. It takes the sun about 200 million years to complete an orbit, which means it’s done something like 22.5 orbits in it’s lifetime. In other words, it wasn’t born anywhere near ‘here’. The nearby stars weren’t born anywhere near it, or here, and in a couple of hundred million years they won’t be anywhere near us either. So talking about ‘this region of space’ is only meaningful over relatively short time scales. Wind things back 4.5 billion years and the sun is on the other side of the galaxy, surrounded by completely different stars.
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