Fluorine – an element found in bones, teeth, and fluoride toothpaste – was recently spotted in a much more exotic location than a convenience store aisle: a galaxy far, far away known as NGP–190387.
This galaxy was originally discovered with the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory and later observed with the Chile-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope.
It is unusually bright considering its distance, and another galaxy in Earth’s line of sight to NGP–190387 further amplified its light, which allowed researchers to identify faint radiation emitted by the fluorine.
Scientists at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, England, used the ALMA telescope to find fluorine in the distant galaxy, said a press release issued Thursday. The element has never been found so far away from the Milky Way before. These findings were published in the Nature Astronomy journal.
The galaxy where it was spotted is so distant that it took more than 12 billion years for its light to reach us here on Earth. So, we observe it as it was when the universe was just 1.4 billion years old, or 10 percent of that galaxy’s current age.
“Since stars expel the elements they form in their cores as they reach the end of their lives, this detection implies that the stars that created fluorine must have lived and died quickly,” said the university press release. Most elements around us are created inside stars, it explained.
“We did not even know which type of stars produced the majority of fluorine in the universe,” before they study, said Maximilien Franco, the post-doctoral research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, who led the new study.
Now researchers believe they have a clearer understanding of where fluorine actually comes from.
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Franco and his collaborators -- including Kristen Coppin, James Geach, and Chiaki Kobayashi from the University of Hertfordshire -- think the element probably comes from Wolf–Rayet stars. These massive stars only exist for a few million years.
“We have shown that Wolf–Rayet stars," Franco said, "which are among the most massive stars known and can explode violently as they reach the end of their lives, help us, in a way, to maintain good dental health!”
Prior to the study, researchers also proposed that fluorine could be produced by pulsations of asymptotic giant branch stars -- giant, evolved stars with masses up to a few times that of our Sun -- which can take billions of years to occur. However, the University of Hertfordshire team thinks that scenario does not fully explain the amount of fluorine they found in NGP–190387.
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“For this galaxy, it took just tens or hundreds of millions of years to have fluorine levels comparable to those found in stars in the Milky Way, which is 13.5 billion years old. This was a totally unexpected result,” said Professor Chiaki Kobayashi, University of Hertfordshire. “Our measurement adds a completely new constraint on the origin of fluorine, which has been studied for two decades.”
Apart from the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies, astronomers have previously discovered fluorine in distant quasars, bright objects powered by supermassive black holes at the center of some galaxies. This study provides the first evidence of the element in a star-forming galaxy from the early history of the universe.
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