Question

How is molybdenum formed?

Answer 1

Its an element

Answer 2

Most heavy elements past iron (#26) are formed from the explosion of gas giants such as super and hypernovas. Stars like the sun, utilizes hydrogen as fuel to create energy (so as to burn) it does this by fusing two hydrogen atoms together and harnessing that energy released as a result of nuclear fusion.

By fusing two hydrogen atoms the end product is helium (, which are the major composition of most stars. However, when a star runs out of hydrogen to fuse, it will start to fuse all the helium it created to produce more energy, when this starts to happen, heavier elements are created as result (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen) etc.

This process repeats itself where the star fuses the previously made atoms until transition metal are formed, all the way up to Iron, cobalt, nickel, copper and zinc. At this point no more fusion can occur because the energy required to fuse these heavy atoms is too great even for the star. When no more atoms are around to fuse, the start begins to collapse from the inside out, since there is no longer release of energy (heat + light) from fusion, this builds immense pressure at the core which causes a tremendous explosion of the star.

This explosion contains massive amounts of thermal and radiation energies that is capable of fusing the iron/transition metal accumulated from the star's core, thus from the explosion, you get a mixture of elements made (heavy metals, lanthanoids, actinoids and of course molybednum) of course the amount of the element formed is based on the easiness of fusion, extremely heavy atoms tend to be more rare than lighter ones.