4 ms·
This just not a necessary fact that making the heavier elements takes more time, and so the more recent stars cannot make such heavy elements?
by everdrive 3y ago
This just not a necessary fact that making the heavier elements takes more time, and so the more recent stars cannot make such heavy elements?
- antognini 3y agoNo. The massive stars that produce these elements have very brief lives. What's different is that the metallicity of later stars is higher than earlier stars. In essence, the earliest stars were formed from gas that had virtually no metals in them and because of that could grow much larger. But after their death, they polluted the ISM with metals which prevented later generations from becoming as massive.