Charles Darwin introduced his theory of biological evolution in The Origin of Species, published in 1859. This development made people wonder what else in Nature had evolved; could, for example, chemical elements evolve? This question was answered in the mid-twentieth century.

In 1950s, several researchers from the United States concluded that all chemical elements originate from hydrogen. The notion that all elements derive from hydrogen was not a completely new hypothesis. In the nineteenth century, a couple of chemists proposed that chemical elements originated from hydrogen. The mechanism for the evolution of elements from hydrog en though was not developed until 1957 by Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle, who presented their mechanism in a paper entitled "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars." They proposed that the stars are the seat of origin of the elements, a process called nucleosynthesis. They concluded that they could...