I get that all of the elements that make us are from stars but I just can’t wrap my head around how I am made of star dust… is this just a broader way of looking at the creation of elements in the periodic table or am I literally made of star dust.
Sorry if this was a stupid question!
In: 141
So there’s a number of elements we see on the periodic table, right? And we call them “light” and “heavy” elements which on a very basic level without getting into specifics is basically how simple or complex an element’s atom is. The only way for heavier elements to exist is for them to be formed through nuclear fusion in which lighter elements are fused together under extreme heat and pressure to form new elements. When the universe was in its infancy the only element around was hydrogen, the simplest and lighter element, in gigantic clouds. Now don’t ask me how hydrogen came to be in the first place I don’t know and I’m not entirely sure science has a concrete answer. Well hydrogen is matter, with mass, so those huge spread out clouds had a rough barycenter towards which all that hydrogen started being pulled into due to gravitational force, which is a force all matter inherently exerts in time space. These masses of hydrogen grew not only more massive but hotter as well, because hydrogen being pulled from light years away and is constantly accelerating when it all comes down to the center point it has significant speed. That coupled with its enormous mass which only grows bigger, making the gravitational pull also stronger, created very huge and hot balls of hydrogen, called stars, which are hot enough to kickstart and sustain nuclear fusion. So throughout a star’s life time it is constantly fusing lighter elements into heavier elements, until it basically runs out of fuel and bursts, spreading those elements into space. So this process occurred billions or trillions or who knows how many times and more starts formed from heavier elements and created even heavier elements and spread those out and much in the same manner planets formed, with enough matter coalescing into a single clump but not enough to form a star since all those clumps forming close to each other essentially compete for the available matter close to them, in cosmic terms.
Matter, fundamentally, cannot be destroyed. It can be changed through nuclear fusion, or nuclear fission, the opposite of fusion, in which heavier elements are broken down into lighter elements, but the atoms making up that matter cannot be destroyed. So basically what that means is that for you to exist, with all the elements that make up you, on a planet, with all the elements that make up it, in a solar system, with all the elements that make up it, and so on and so on, those elements, had to, at some point, been formed in the core of a star. Your atoms have existed since the beginning of the universe and gone through who knows how many things and will go on to be something else after you die. So yes technically everything is made from star dust.
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