Evolutionists historically have had difficulty explaining the origin of heavy elements, because a big bang would produce only the three lightest elements: hydrogen, helium, and lithium. The other 100+ elements supposedly formed deep inside stars and during stellar explosions. This theory is hard to verify, because stellar interiors and explosions cannot be carefully analyzed. However, a vast region of gas containing the mass of 300,000,000,000,000 suns has been found that is quite rich in iron and other heavy elements. The number of nearby visible stars is a thousand times too small to account for the heavy elements in that huge region.a Heavy elements are even relatively abundant in nearly empty regions of space that are far from stars and galaxies.b
Most hydrogen atoms weigh one atomic mass unit, but some, called heavy hydrogen, weigh two units. If everything in the universe came from a big bang or from being in a swirling gas cloud for billions of years, heavy hydrogen should be uniformly mixed with normal hydrogen. It is not.c Comets have twice the concentration of heavy hydrogen as oceans, but oceans have 10 – 50 times the concentration of heavy hydrogen as the solar system and interstellar matter. [See “Heavy Hydrogen” on page 313.]