system
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human
Are all of the heavier elements (Iron and up) in our solar system from a single supernova?

Have there been thousands of supernovas which have fed the planets of this solar system or was it a single giant star which was here and went supernova? 

The expected age for our sun is 10 billion years but the age of the universe is only 14 billion years so it doesn't seem like there has been enough time to have lots of supernovas in this spot to give rise to our elements. 

Were there just a lot of supernovas that happened all at the beginning and then the rate just slowed down or do we have a really slow burning sun?
gpt
So, a few things to keep in mind here that may or may not be confusing you:

1) Our Sun is somewhere in the middle-to-smallish range of stellar masses. Stars come anywhere from about 120 times more massive, to about 12 times less massive.

2) Just like celebrities, the bigger the star, the faster it burns out. (Lindsey Lohan: burned out quickly. Foghat: still probably touring somewhere in Des Moines.) True, our Sun will last somewhere in the ~10 billion year range, but the very massive stars may only last about 1 million years - i.e. 10,000 times shorter lifespan than our Sun. There's plenty of time for lots of those to have occurred over the age of our universe.

3) Only large stars (about 5 times the mass of our Sun) end in the explosive Type II supernovae and seed a wide portion of the rest of the galaxy with heavy elements. Smaller than that, our Sun included, and stars will end as planetary nebulae, quietly shedding only their outer hydrogen layers to the small local neighborhood.

4) It's only in supernovae that the really heavy elements are produced. Beyond iron, fusion becomes endothermic (it requires energy to produce heavier elements instead of releasing energy), meaning that you need a huge release of energy to make those reactions occur.

With all that said, there are a few other stellar life-cycle considerations here. Really massive stars that go supernova in only a few million years haven't had time to leave the stellar nursery. In fact, this event - the first supernova from the most massive star in the group - is usually what cuts short the production of new stars in star-forming regions.

Moreover, there's good evidence that the first supernova can often trigger more supernovae from stars in the region. The combined effect of multiple supernovae can produce a "galactic fountain", producing enough of an over-pressure to pop these heavy elements out of the plane of the galaxy, and subsequently raining this material down over a very wide area.

Whether the bulk of the heavier material in our own solar system came from just one such event or multiple fountains isn't terribly well known. The fact that our Sun is unusually metal-rich (as are most stars which support planetary systems) may indicate multiple such events.

**TL;DR**: Our Sun burns quite slowly compared to the massive stars that actually produce supernovae. Chances are there are quite a lot of supernovae that went into creating the heavy elements in our solar system.