Stars May Stop Producing Elements Due to Excessive Heavy Metal Content

Stellar bodies are among the cosmic materials that could produce several elements similar to what we could find on our planet. They can carry unexpected compositions buried on Earth's deposits or even the tiny chemicals that build our anatomical structure. These elements are always present in the deep space, but due to many factors revolving around stellar bodies, it always depends on the stars and the chemicals they contain if a transition occurs over time.

Stars and Heavy Metals

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TOPSHOT - This long exposure picture taken on December 23, 2017 shows the pleiades, as seen from Bago, located 91 kilometres north-east of Yangon.

New findings from a team of astronomical experts recently presented a new idea on how many of the youngest generations of stellar bodies in the universe will reach a point where they will eventually cease to produce any of the known minerals and metals in space.

The latest study on the star's element production was led by experts from the ARC Center of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in Three Dimensions or ASTRO 3D. Each member of the team hail from their respective institutes, including the Australian National University (ANU), Monash University, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Monash University's School of Physics & Astronomy expert Amanda Karakas, who authored the first study, said in a EurekAlert report that previous researches identify the periodic table's hydrogen and helium as products of the Big Bang.

"Over time, the stars that came after the Big Bang produce heavier elements," she added.

The metal-rich star, like the sun also spewed its products across the void, which ultimately enriched the composition present across the galaxy.

For example, low-mass stars that can produce heavy elements, including barium and strontium gave way to the presence of almost 90 percent of the lead on our planet. However, the production of these elements was also found to depend on the status of a star's birth. The study was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, titled "The most metal-rich asymptotic giant branch stars."

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Evolution of Stars Depend on Their Metal and Gas Content During Birth

Astrophysicist and author of the separate study Giulia Cinquegrana said in the report that just a tiny amount of change found in the gases of stars since their birth could change how they evolve and give off metals on space.

In their findings, Cinquegrana and Karakas determined that the initial metal composition in the gas of the stars is limited to a threshold that, at one point, will stop producing an output of the metals. The separate findings were published in the same journal, titled "The most metal-rich stars in the universe: chemical contributions of low- and intermediate-mass asymptotic giant branch stars with metallicities within 0.04 ≤ Z ≤ 0.10."

Our system's sun is included in the stars that both studies covered. Although the glowing orb is already peaking at 4.5 billion years of age, the sun is still considered in its middle age. Despite the age, our parent star is metal-rich compared to the first generations and still contains such heavy elements found in stellar bodies grouped across the Milky Way.

Based on the studies, the experts predicted the evolution in younger stars, or the most recent generations of stellar clusters, which are indeed seven times more metal-rich than the sun. The analysis concluded that due to the intensive amount of elements in them, the young ones act a bit differently compared to the sun's activities. Because of this, the production of various elements in the universe is destined to change over time, with the possibility of chemical distribution becoming very distinct from what we observe today.