Meaning: Use up, consume fully. Classified under: Verbs of eating and drinking. Synonyms: expend; use. Context example: The legislature expended its time on school questions Expend entails doing...: consume; deplete; eat; eat up; exhaust; run through; use up; wipe out (use up (resources or materials)) Troponyms (each of the following is one way to expend):
Supernova nucleosynthesis. Supernova nucleosynthesis is a theory of the production of many different chemical elements in supernova explosions, first advanced by Fred Hoyle in 1954. The nucleosynthesis, or fusion of lighter elements into heavier ones, occurs during explosive oxygen burning and silicon burning processes. Those fusion reactions create the elements silicon, sulfur, chlorine, argon, sodium, potassium, calcium, scandium, titanium and iron peak elements: vanadium, chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt, and nickel.
In general, such elements up to iron are made in large stars in the process of becoming supernovas. Iron-56 is particularly common, since it is the most stable element that can easily be made from alpha particles (being a product of decay of radioactive nickel-56, ultimately made from 14 helium nuclei). Elements heavier than iron are made in energy-absorbing processes in large stars, and their abundance in the universe (and on Earth) generally decreases with their atomic number.