Sign up for the Starts With a Bang newsletter Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all Where do the heaviest elements in the Universe come from? If you were like most astrophysicists during the 20th century, you might’ve said from supernova explosions: stellar cataclysms that occur either within the cores of massive stars or from stellar corpses (white dwarfs) that undergo destructive, energy-releasing events that trigger a rapid succession of nuclear ...