Fluoride is an element present in our bones and teeth.
From its facilities in Chile, a team of astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) carried out a discovery showing how fluorine is forged, an element present in our bones and teeth, in the universe.
Through the Atacama Large Milimeter / submilimeter Array (ALMA), of which ESO is a partner, this team of scientists has been able to detect fluorine in a galaxy so far away that Its light has taken more than 12,000 million years to reach us, assuming the first time this element has been found in such a distant active formation galaxy.
“We all know fluoride, because the toothpaste that we use every day contains it “, recalled in a statement Maximilien Franco, researcher at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom and director of this study that is published today in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Franco has explained that, like most elements, fluorine is created within stars, but until now it was not clear how this component was produced.
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“We didn’t even know what kind of stars produced most of the fluorine in the universe,” Franco added.
The researcher and his collaborators captured fluorine (in the form of hydrogen fluoride) in large gas clouds in the distant galaxy NGP-190387, which is observed as it was when the Universe was only 1,400 million years old, approximately 10% of their current age.
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Since stars expel the elements they form in their cores at the end of their lives, this detection implies that the stars that created fluorine must have had a very rapid cycle of life and death.
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The team believes that Wolf-Rayet stars, very massive stars that live for only a few million years, the blink of an eye in the history of the Universe, are the places where fluoride is likely to be produced. This is the only way to explain the amounts of hydrogen fluoride detected by the team.
“We have shown that Wolf-Rayet stars, which are among the most massive stars known, and that they can explode violently at the end of their lives, They help us, in a way, to maintain good dental health ”, joked Franco.
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The discovery in NGP-190387 represents one of the first detections of fluorine beyond the Milky Way and its neighboring galaxies.
Astronomers had seen this element before in distant quasars, bright objects powered by supermassive black holes in the center of some galaxies, but never before has this element been observed in an active star-forming galaxy so early in the Universe. (I)
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