We Are Made Of Star Dust

We are made of Star Dust

Though the overwhelming majority of humanity has never grazed the cosmic void, our atoms derive from deep space.

Almost every atom within each of us was once actually part of a nebula - The exact same atoms that build our bodies, were created by stars.

Giant stars, far larger than our Sun, veer towards a dramatic death at the final stages of their spectacular existence - The remainder of a star's energy then irradiates gas and dust that collect all around it, generating new elements that will enrich the atmosphere from which future stars and planets can eventually form.

So over the course of billions of years, these atoms are "recycled" into an uncountable number of different things, in all possible configurations, from simple table salt (NaCl) to our own, very complex, helical DNA that make us uniquely...Us.

But it's always the very same atoms produced in these colossal stellar deaths: matter that dying stars shed from their external layers during the last phase of their life.

And what we're witnessing is death and rebirth on the cosmic scale!

The intense radiation from the star's final explosion then contributes, through collisions of all those atoms in the outer layers, to form heavier atoms (almost everything from Iron (Fe) onwards on the periodic table).

Without supernovae, none of what we have around us would exist!

What then remains in the centre depends on the mass of the star - some supernova events leave behind a super-dense neutron star, while other more massive stars leave behind black holes.

This is the dust (all atoms except hydrogen and helium) inside the giant star-forming region known as the Pillars of Creation, about 6,500 light-years away (source: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScl)

They are, in turn, part of a much larger region called the Eagle Nebula, a young open cluster of stars in the constellation Serpens, part of a diffuse emission nebula, or H II region.

This image here was taken by the camera of the James Webb Space Telescope, at infrared wavelengths.

Within its depths, are a myriad of protostars and early stars in formation.

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1998 SNL cartoon sketch

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