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?

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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

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There was an article in Scientific American a few years back which provided insight into our sun’s kin. If I remember correctly they’ve found a few stars with our sun’s exact composition inferring they came from the same star remnant. You may be able to find something on this if you google “sun’s sister stars” or something of that nature.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Stars are born in gas clouds called nebulas.

It is believed the universe is 14 billion years old. How long a star lives is dependent on its size.

The sun will live about 10 billion years, we’re about halfway through our suns life.

A star much bigger than the sun will blow through its fuel in a few million years, meaning many stars could have lived and died in the 9 billion years before our sun was born.

A massive star will explode in a supernova creating lots of different elements. Then the cloud can collapse to form a new star with the lighter elements, with the larger atoms forming the solar system.

So all those previous stars created the larger elements ultimately forming the large elements we see on earth.

Eventually our star will die. The sun will swell up to a red giant, swallow several planets. Then the sun’s core will collapse and the outer layers will drift away. The change in the subs mass will probably cause the rest of the planets orbits to go haywire, maybe shoot a couple off into space.

The gas giants are full of gasses that could one day find themselves creating a new star with new planets orbiting. But that wont be for billions of years.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.