All these worlds with moons have one thing in common: they orbit stars with a large amount of heavy elements, relatively speaking, and those stars are going to one day add even more heavy elements to our universe that can get pulled into making future planets but maybe only to a point.

According to a new set of papers appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society with lead authors Chiaki Kobayashi and Amanda Karakas, as stars are built out of more and more metal-rich material over time, they will eventually stop adding more heavy elements to space as they lock away more and more heavy elements in white dwarfs and other stellar remnants. This means, if this model is right, we could have a peak amount of heavy elements that we can’t get past.

This is just a computer model, but it is a neat one to think about and is the perfect fodder for some long thinking sci-fi author.

More Information

Science in Public press release

“The most metal-rich asymptotic giant branch stars,” Amanda I Karakas, Giulia Cinquegrana, and Meridith Joyce, 2021 November 9, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society