If stars can’t fuse iron, where do it and all other heavier elements come from?

Question

If stars can’t fuse iron, where do it and all other heavier elements come from?

In: 7

Answer 1

Also stars, just bigger ones. The key is that they can only *produce energy* up until iron. But, if you have a ~~very large star exploding,~~ or two “smaller” (still very big) stars colliding together, you have a lot of energy there already. And that energy is used to explode and fuse into the elements heavier than iron.

Edit: looking up the topic, recent evidence has actually shown that the exploding star hypothesis doesn’t actually work out, it turns out that about half comes from the colliding neutron stars, and the other half comes from a slower process where neutrons hit stable nuclei, and then they beta decay into heavier elements.