Conversation

Just learned about a really cool thing - Przybylski's Star. It's a "chemically peculiar" (Serious Astronomical Term) that's VERY weird indeed - weird elements like holmium, scandium, neodymium, and uranium present at 1,000x to 10,000x their abundance in our own Sun.

In fact, some even weirder elements - plutonium, einsteinium, californium - have been detected as well. Which is REALLY weird - those have short enough half-lives at a cosmic scale that we don't really observe those ANYWHERE in nature, because they disappear so quickly that they would have to have been produced very recently in cosmic time.

It's actually been proposed that the star may contain the theorized but as-yet-undiscovered "island of stability" isotopes of exotic superheavy elements like flerovium, or Element 120, or Element 126 - and that the reason we're seeing those strange radioactive elements is actually as decay products from these exotic isotopes.

This just seems like the sort of thing that is OBVIOUSLY the hook for a science-fiction novel.