Posted by:
Brother Of Jerry
(
)
Date: April 12, 2024 10:10PM
Once something gets lodged in El Gato's brain, it is practically impossible to dislodge it, the Great Attractor being a prime case in point.
Oh, and Gato, it's kilonova. And we are not just stardust slowed down. Nor are we energy slowed down. We are, however, mostly stardust from past exploded stars.
Carbon is not the product of a supernova. It is a typical product of fusion reactions in normal starts - hydrogen fuses to helium, and helium fuses to carbon. That s usually the end of the line, though fusion can create elements up to iron.
Iron is basically the bottom of the well. It takes more energy to fuse elements heavier than iron than the fusion reaction produces. For elements lighter than iron, the fusion reaction requires energy to start, but the reaction releases more energy than it took to start the reaction - that's how a hydrogen bomb works.
Fission reactions are when energy is released when heavy atoms are split into lighter ones. Iron is the bottom element for that as well. Below iron, fission takes more energy to happen than is released by the fission. But I digress.
The elements heavier than iron are made in supernovae, so all the heavier elements in our bodies came from exploding stars, i.e. stardust. The lighter elements got scattered around by a supernova, but they existed for the most part before the star exploded.
Details, start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis