How are we made of star stuff?
We Asked a NASA Scientist.
Well, the important thing to understand
about this question
is that it's not an analogy, it's literally true.
The elements in our bodies,
the elements that make up our bones,
the trees we see outside,
the other planets in the solar system,
other stars in the galaxy.
These were all part of stars that existed
well before our Sun and Earth
and solar system were even formed.
The universe existed
for billions of years before we did.
And all of these elements
that you see
on the periodic table,
you see carbon and oxygen and silicon and iron,
the common elements
throughout the universe,
were all put there
by previous generations of stars
that either
blew off winds
like the Sun blows off a solar wind,
or exploded in supernova explosions
and thrust their elements
throughout the universe.
These are the same things
that we can trace with modern telescopes,
like the Hubble Telescope
and the James Webb Space Telescope,
the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
These are all elements
that we can map out in the universe
with these observatories
and trace back to the same things that form us
and the elemental abundances
that we see in stars now
are the same things that we see
in the Earth's crust,
we see in asteroids.
And so we know that
these are the same elements
that were once part of these stars.
So the question of,
“How are we made of star stuff?”,
in the words of Carl Sagan,
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
We Asked a NASA Scientist.
NASA. A NASA 360 Production.
