This element is found in both our teeth and in a galaxy which is 12 billion light years away

Astronomers have discovered that our teeth and a galaxy which is 12 billion light-years away have something in common.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) along with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has detected fluorine in a distant galaxy called NGP-190387.

This chemical element is also found in our teeth and bones in the form of fluoride.

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The study, conducted by the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The discovery marks one of the first detections of fluorine beyond the Milky Way and its neighbouring galaxies.

Earlier, it had been spotted inonly distant quasars, bright objects powered by supermassive black holes at the centre of some galaxies

According to the study's author, Maximilien Franco, ''We did not even know which type of stars produced the majority of fluorine in the Universe!''

Models of the Big Bang at the birth of the universe almost 14 billion years ago allow astronomers to calculate quite accurately how much fluorine should be present.

''Our measurement adds a completely new constraint on the origin of fluorine, which has been studied for two decades,'' said study's co-author Chiaki Kobayashi.

Meanwhile, Chentao Yang from ESO said, ''ALMA is sensitive to radiation emitted by cold interstellar gas and dust. With the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), we will be able to observe NGP-190387 through the direct light of stars, gaining crucial information on the stellar content of this galaxy.''

Previously, scientists had discovered lithium in a type of stellar explosion known as a nova for the first time.

It helped clear up a longstanding mystery in astrophysics about the quantity of the element that has been observed in stars.