YES, MORTAL: It would have come as a surprise to your benighted ancestors who lived before the age of the telescope BUT most stars in the Universe have a companion star in a gravitationally bound orbit around a common centre of mass.

MOST STARS ARE BINARY!!!

If both of these stars are supergiants of 10-25 solar masses they will both die in a type II supernova in about 20 million years. After the outer layers of these enormous stars are blown away the system will be left with 2 neutron stars.

Sometimes these stars are close enough to each other to allow a Binary Neutron Star Merger. Due to gravitational radiation they gradually spiral into each other as their orbits contract until they meet in a KILONOVA!

The INSANE GRAVITATIONAL FORCE before they meet tears the stars apart spreading free neutrons around in quantities, densities and temperatures impossible to find anywhere else, (except for the re-expanded core of a core collapse supernova).

These UNIQUE conditions allow free neutrons to aggregate onto each other, forming heavy, unstable, neutron balls that rapidly beta decay into stable atomic nuclei, thereby synthesising most of the heavy elements from Ruthenium up to Plutonium and beyond, including most of the Universe's Gold, Platinum and Silver.

Now THAT is the R PROCESS!

The force of the Kilonova blasts much of this material into the Inter-Stellar Medium enriching it with vast amounts of heavy elements.

GOD is MOST PLEASED with this innovation as he will need those elements in the FUTURE that is to come.