Did You Know You Are Made of Stardust?

Winter Sky, Fraser, Colorado

www.dennismook.com

You are made from stardust!  Isn't that an interesting thought?  Kind of romantic, isn't it?  Well, the truth is that you, me, everything you see is made from stardust.  Yep, everything you can see, feel, smell, taste and feel is made from stardust.  Let me give you a very short explanation.  I'll try to get this right.

When a star burns, there is a tremendous battle between gravity trying to collapse it in on itself and the energy within trying to explode it outward.  As long as it has fuel to burn, there is equilibrium.  The star burns and gives off light, heat and some other particles.

When a star is born, it is mostly hydrogen.  Clouds of hydrogen coalesce through gravity and form the ball.  The reason you see it burning brightly is that the hydrogen is fusing into helium through tremendous gravitational pressure and the offshoot is the light, energy and those other particles I mentioned.  This atomic fusion process goes on for billions of years to turn all the hydrogen into helium, then helium to lithium, the lithium to beryllium, then to boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and finally to iron.  When it gets to iron, the star can no longer create heavier particles through nuclear fusion and the battle between the energy and gravity starts to tip in the favor of gravity.  As the star collapses in on itself, the temperatures and pressures rise to unbelievable amounts.  In stars that are much bigger than ours, the additional elements are created through even greater levels of temperatures and pressures.  The star finally explodes into what is called a supernova.  All that matter, all those elements it created through fusion, get spewed out into the universe.  That includes things such as gold, silver, silicon, cadmium, rhodium and the rest of the elements on the Periodic Table of the Elements.  Look one up for a complete list.

After a lot of time passes, millions or billions of years, these clouds of gases and particles start to coalesce into new stars.  The matter (solid particles) that will form around new stars, such as the rocky and gas planets, asteroids, comets, and so on.  In other words, a new solar system may form.  In other cases just a star will form, without an associated solar system of planets. 

But the point is, that our sun is a newer generation star that is made up of hydrogen, helium, etc. that coalesced from the gas cloud of an exploded star.  The planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, were formed by the elements that were spewed forth by a supernova exploding giant star from the past.

We are all made form stardust!  Romantic, isn't it!  Or not.

Enjoy!

Thanks for looking.
Dennis Mook