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Article Length : 534 Words

Everything you see around you is made from ancient stardust. What could be more unbelievable than to find yourself alive each morning made of star dust, eating breakfast which was stardust, driving a stardust car to a stardust supermarket to buy stardust groceries?

There are 92 naturally occurring elements on earth. From hydrogen to uranium, the elements have a lot of things in common. The critical difference between hydrogen (the smallest natural element) and uranium (the heaviest natural element), is the numbers of protons found inside the nucleus itself. Performing a ‘proton count’ will determine how many electrons that atom wants. It will also tell you roughly how many neutrons it will also want, for the nucleus to remain stable.

For many years after Dmitri Mendeleev started charting the atoms, it was not known how the various elements were formed. But then it was discovered that if two smaller atoms were aimed at each other, so that the very tiny nucleus of one atom ran straight into the nucleus of the other, they can glue together and form a larger atom by adding their protons together. So elements are fundamental, but only at low temperatures. At higher temperatures they can and do change their "atomic number" through collision. When two small atoms collide and merge to form a larger, single atom, that process, called fusion, will (if the atoms are small enough) radiate extra energy as well!

There then came the realisation that there are places in the universe where the particles were always kept at those high temperatures. These are the kinds of temperatures expected to be found inside stars. Was there any way of confirming this idea? The light from stars is very revealing of their atomic content (and surface temperature also) and there is a clear relationship between the age of a star and the sizes of atoms found inside it. Stars are atom smashers, where smaller atoms collide and create larger atoms.

So it seems that stars really do build bigger atoms from smaller atoms and that this really is why they shine! We see most of them only because they are busily making helium from hydrogen.

Humans are built from a dazzling mixture of atoms. And most of your body mass, carbons, nitrogens, oxygens, can only have come from the insides of an ancient, long gone star. All the radioactive elements found on earth are in trace amounts, and the only place they could conceivably have been formed is in a supernova. Indeed it is likely that the atoms making up everything and everyone on earth, were all once inside the same supernova. Once our atoms were visible across the length and breadth of the universe. Now they are inside us. We were born inside stars.

A marine biologist might say we were born in the oceans, an astronomer says we were really born inside a star. Both are right! So you can sit at the beach at night and trace your entire ancestry. All the clues are right there. The land behind you and beneath you, the oceans before you and the stars above you and beyond you. All are needed for the universe to create a you.