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Acrobatic-Secret374 t1_iyji4zp wrote

To expand on this... Virtually everything heavier than iron must be formed by stellar explosions.

Either the star explodes, or two stars collide and explode (like neutron dwarf star collisions (NS-NS) )

Iron uses more energy to fuse than it makes in fusion. So, once a star starts to make iron, it is already dying. Supernova only make a small fraction of stuff heavier than iron (5%) the rest is NS-NS collisions.

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