Heaviest Chemical Elements Created by Ancient Stars

The heaviest chemical elements in the universe come from neutron stars. Find out how a new study shows that this process creates heavier atoms than anything we experience on Earth.

Like most people, all my high school science classrooms had one wall papered with a huge, multi-coloured chart. It was, of course, the Periodic Table of the Elements.

Readers who were paying extra-close attention in their chemistry classes may remember that Dimitri Mendeleev came up with the periodic table in 1869. He organized the known chemical elements into a chart, based on their atomic masses and properties.

Mendeleev left gaps in the table for elements that hadn’t been discovered yet. The resulting table is a foundation of science that chemists still use, with some revisions, every day.

‘We Are Made of Star Stuff’

There’s a popular saying that “we are made of star stuff.” The phrase comes from Carl Sagan, and he was referring to the fact that stars generate all of the universe’s chemical elements through a process called nucleosynthesis.