Element present in human teeth is found in distant galaxy

We really are made of stardust, as astronomer Carl Sagan once said. The famous phrase confirms an unprecedented discovery of astronomy.

For the first time, astronomers have detected an element found in our teeth in a very distant galaxy – located more than 12 billion light years away.

The element is fluorine, which can be found in our bones and teeth.

“We all know about fluoride because the toothpaste we use every day contains fluorine,” the study’s lead author Maximilien Franco, a postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, said in a statement. .

“We didn’t even know what kind of star produced most of the fluor in the Universe!” The elements found in our solar system, on Earth, and even in our own bodies originated within the nuclei of stars, which released them in stellar explosions.

However, the mystery of how fluorine was created inside these stars persists. Researchers used telescopes in Chile to detect fluorine in the galaxy.

Origins

Fluorine was present as hydrogen fluoride in the gas clouds of galaxy NGP-190387. Light from this galaxy has traveled more than 12 billion years to reach us, so astronomers see the galaxy as it came about, when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old.

Stars that released fluor throughout the universe probably lived fast and died young, the researchers said, pointing to Wolf-Rayet stars as their likely origin.

Wolf-Rayet Stars

These evolved stars are incredibly massive, but they only survive for a few million years – a short timeline when compared to the 13 billion years our universe has existed.

Only a few massive stars evolve into Wolf-Rayets as they near the end of their lives. This stage lasts a few hundred thousand years, but in the life of a star this is very little.

Only one in 100 million stars is massive enough to be a Wolf-Rayets.

Previously, researchers thought stars with this classification were likely sources of fluorine, and this direct detection confirms this.

“We’ve shown that Wolf-Rayet stars, which are among the most massive stars known and can explode violently when they reach the end of their lives, help us, in a way, to maintain good oral health,” said Franco.

A study detailing these findings was published on Thursday (5) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Fluorine and the primordial universe

Other potential sources of fluorine that scientists have considered include pulsating stars with a mass a few times that of our sun.

But the evolution of these celestial bodies takes place over billions of years, which would take a long time and would not explain the amount of fluorine detected in the distant galaxy.

“For this galaxy, it took just tens or hundreds of millions of years to have fluorine levels comparable to those found in the stars of the Milky Way, which is 13.5 billion years old. This was a totally unexpected result,” said study co-author Chiaki Kobayashi, a professor at the University of Hertfordshire, in a statement.

“Our measurement adds a completely new restriction to the origin of fluorine, which has been studied for two decades.”

Finding fluor in such a distant galaxy expands this element’s range. Prior to this discovery, it had only been detected in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and its neighbors, as well as in some distant quasars, or bright celestial objects that are powered by supermassive black hole engines at the center of some galaxies.

But this detection places fluorine as an element that existed at the beginning of the universe.

The researchers are eager to observe the galaxy using the Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in Chile and due to begin observations in 2027, which could reveal more details about NGP-190387 and its mysteries.

(This text is a translation. To read the original, in English, click here)