ARE WE STARDUST?

 “Some people are just light, glow, and hope… human stars.”

You might have heard that we are made of stardust. So, let us discuss that today.

First, we need to have some basic knowledge about the formation of elements. Basically, elements like hydrogen, lithium and helium were formed along with the big bang. All the other elements were formed through a complex process called stellar nucleosynthesis. We are not going to learn about that very deeply because it is a complicated topic to understand. 

And for a basic context, all stars have limited fuel inside their cores. When they run out of fuel, they die, which means that they convert into white dwarfs, black holes, or neutron stars, depending on their size (I talked about this in my neutron star post) 

When a massive star dies, it causes a huge explosion and cools down, hence forming a supernova. (A supernova is very bright, by the way.) So, when a supernova is formed, the elements inside the stars get spread all over the universe.

This material that they spread is what we call stardust. Stardust has a lot of other components in it (like ice, rock, etc.) other than just elements. But we will be right now just talking about the elements.

Now let us talk about the history of stars and their connection with human beings. So millions of years ago, the first generation of stars was formed. So the stars of this generation were very big than the ones we see now.

And we have another concept according to which the size of a star determines how fast it will burn its fuel. The size of the star is directly proportional to the rate with which the star burns its fuel. The bigger a star, the faster it will burn its fuel. Due to their weight, the first stars burned their fuels really fast and exploded into a supernova. These stars burned so quickly that they could only produce elements like hydrogen, helium and trace amounts of heavy metals inside them.

As the further generations appeared, more complex elements began forming.

Now, what does this have to with us? 

So our bodies (and everything else on our earth) are also made up of elements, and all the elements (except hydrogen and helium) out of these were formed in stars.

The calcium in your bones, the carbon in your skin, the iron in your blood, they all trace back to the stars that formed ages ago. So in some sense, we are stardust.