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fivegrays fivegrays
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11 years ago
I am part of an astronomy group and a question posed to us is "What elements are formed when a Star goes Supernova?" I've tried to research this but to no avail. Can anyone help?
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11 years ago
Pretty much all of them.

As a star grows old it starts to produce heavier and heavier elements in its core through increasingly more complex fusion.
(stars generally burn hydrogen into helium, but later they will combine helium into carbon and oxygen etc... as the star gets older and the core gets hotter)

Eventually they start to produce iron in the core by fusion, This is effectively the end of the stars life, since creating iron Takes energy, doesn't produce it.
So the star goes supernova, in this gigantic explosion the pressure and temperature is SO vast that some of the elements inside the star fuse to form (at some percent) all of the elements in the periodic table that have a higher atomic weight than iron.

(You can generally ignore the super-heavy elements at the bottom, but there's probably a tiny percent of those produced in a supernova too)

So Technically the answer to your question is all elements with higher atomic weight than Iron are produced in the Explosion.
While elements with a lower atomic weight are predominately produced before the star goes supernova.

Hope this helps.
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