The two most common elements in the cosmos - hydrogen and helium - were created shortly after the big bang. All other elements that exist today formed in stars and were then blown into space at their explosive end. The following generation of stars collected the material and in turn added even more and even heavier elements. In the intergalactic medium, the "metals", as all elements beyond hydrogen and helium are called in astronomy, gored.
But this process is likely to come to a standstill forever, says a team led by Giulia Cinquegrana and Amanda Karakas from Australia's Monash University. "Our models of supermetal-rich stars show that they, too, inflate to become red giants and then turn into white dwarfs, but at this point they no longer emit heavy elements," says Cinquegrana. "The metals are trapped in the white dwarf remnant."
The two astronomers and their groups have published two specialists in the "Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society" [1, 2]. Her simulations have shown that even slight changes in the elementary composition of an emerging star have had a significant impact on its further development. Stars of the youngest generation sometimes have the seven -time metal content of the sun.
However, there is no reason to fear that the nascent solar systems will run out of material for planets and living beings in the near future. Especially since there are still countless middle-aged stars like our Sun that will enrich the galactic environment with new metals for the foreseeable future. The sun is estimated to be four and a half billion years old, and it will take another six to seven billion years before it too breathes out its existence in the form of an expanding gas cloud.
