Those are from the progenitor stars that formed the nebula that our sun formed from. Our star has never gone nova and never will.
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ragingHungryPanda@piefed.keyboardvagabond.com 4 weeks ago
our sun has already kaboomed once, that’s why we have heavy elements that are only made in nova
teft@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
That’s not quite right. Our sun has never gone nova, and is a fairly young main sequence star. It’s still in the first “main sequence” of fusion after accumulating from scattered matter. It’s heavy enough to do fusion, but not heavy enough to really “properly” go boom at the end.
While novas form heavy elements, the originating star either becomes a neutron star or black hole. Sol, our sun, is a a “normal” star which means it won’t properly go nova. It’ll just “burn out” and become a white dwarf.
The matter ejected by a Nova flies out into the universe and falls in the gravity wells of other Solar systems. So our heavy elements likely hail from millions of other past stars.