Silver stars

Some 42 stars in our galaxy have taken on debris from an earlier generation of now-exploded stars. Kind of like how some white dwarfs are polluted by full planets; but these stars' debris is not planetary: it is rhodium or silver or massive metals like that.

Whence all that? from fission. So who's blasting Orions near those old stars?

Nah: fission happens naturally. Lots of neutrons jack up the atomic mass. If the process is rapid enough then some yuuuge element will result. You remember - like in Oppenheimer, which you can watch in the kinoplex this weekend if you didn't catch it last time. Natural reactors exist such as in Gabon and, I suspect, Ceres. In these stars' case the process is, or was, an "r-process" for "rapid neutron capture".

This process involves neutron stars: birth or merger. (Or death, but I know of little that can destroy a citywide quarkless ball of neutrons - black hole collapse?) The magic number, if you will, seems to be 260, before the atom cracks apart (and fires off more neutrons).

If the capture is rapid enough I wonder if neutron-stars can cook up something in the 290s (now we know Oxygen-28 doesn't work). Since the alchemical synthesis of lawrencium-266 a decade ago; work continues on finding the fabled isle of Stabilitas. The island may still be mythical however for other reasons involved with their colossal mass. There's your synthium.