Young stars do not bring any gain
"We are all stardust" is not without reason, because almost all the elements we are made of were incubated in dying stars. But this will one day come to an end.
The two most common elements in the cosmos - hydrogen and helium - were formed shortly after the Big Bang. All other elements that exist today were formed in stars and then blown into space at their explosive end. The following generation of stars collected the material and added for their part still more and also still heavier elements. Thus, in the intergalactic medium, the "metals," as all elements beyond hydrogen and helium are called in astronomy, continued to accumulate.
But this process may soon come to a halt forever, now says a team led by Giulia Cinquegrana and Amanda Karakas of Australia's Monash University. "Our models of supermetallic stars show that they also inflate to become red giants and then turn into white dwarfs, but at that point they no longer eject heavy elements," Cinquegrana says. "The metals become locked in the white dwarf remnant."
The two astronomers and their groups have published two technical papers on the subject in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society(1, 2). Their simulations have shown that even small changes in the elemental composition of a nascent star have a significant effect on its further evolution. Stars of the youngest generation sometimes have seven times the metal content of the Sun.
However, it is not to be feared that in the near future the developing solar systems will run out of building material for planets and living beings. Especially since there are still countless medium old stars like our sun, which 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 be another six to seven billion years before it too breathes its last in the form of an expanding gas cloud.
Spectrum of Science
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