(COURTHOUSE NEWS) – For the first time, fluorine – the chemical element found as fluoride in bones, teeth and toothpaste – has been discovered outside the Milky Way in a galaxy so far away it’s taken over 12 billion years for its light to reach Earth.
How fluorine is created has been a point of debate, but like most elements that make up the planets – and even our bodies – it’s known to have first formed inside stars, according to the Herschel Space Observatory’s history of chemicals.
The process begins when a star forms from a hydrogen cloud. The star’s core generates heat that ignites a reaction, known as nucleosynthesis, that converts the hydrogen into helium. The more mass a star has, the more rounds of nucleosynthesis it can have, each time producing heavier elements until it produces an iron core.
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