e truly are made of star stuff, as astronomer Carl Sagan once said.
For the first time, astronomers have detected an element found in our bodies in a galaxy that is more than 12 billion light-years away.
The element, fluorine, can be found in our bones and teeth as fluoride.
“We all know about fluorine because the toothpaste we use every day contains it in the form of fluoride,” said lead study author Maximilien Franco, an astrophysics postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom, in a statement. “We did not even know which type of stars produced the majority of fluorine in the Universe!”
The elements found across our solar system, on Earth and even in our own bodies originated inside the cores of stars, which released them in stellar explosions. But the mystery of how fluorine was created within these stars has persisted.
Researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes in Chile to make the detection of fluorine in an incredibly distant star-forming galaxy.
Read more at CNN.
{Matzav.com}
