The Stars Within Us: Why Everything in You is Stellar
Take a deep breath.
That air filling up your lungs, that oxygen pulled into your bloodstream, stoking your metabolic fire, making you possible, is old. Older than you, older than the Earth itself. That oxygen once lived in the heart of a star that is now long dead. That calcium in your bones? That iron in your blood? The same.
Billions of years ago, there was no Earth, no sun, nor even a solar system. There was just a relatively featureless cloud of gas and dust, hundreds of light-years across. Pretty much in stable equilibrium, that cloud could persist for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. But given just a little nudge — perhaps by a nearby supernova going off, sending its blast wave echoing through the nascent cloud — it quickly fragmented, folding in on itself in a complicated tangle of knots and streams.
Pockets of gas pinch off and catastrophically collapse, in some cases reaching such incredible densities and pressures that nuclear fusion begins deep in the heart of a young system: This is the birth of a star .
The shattered remains of the cloud organize themselves into a disk. The disk spawns planets that cannibalize more material as they grow and compete for space around the new sun. In fits and starts and collisions, and in migrations and bursts of intense radiation, the leftover debris is cleared from the system, leaving a family: a star (maybe two), a few rocky planets, gas giants, asteroids and frozen leftovers in the outskirts.
A solar system is born.
- See more at: The Stars Within Us: Why Everything in You is Stellar
Take a deep breath.
That air filling up your lungs, that oxygen pulled into your bloodstream, stoking your metabolic fire, making you possible, is old. Older than you, older than the Earth itself. That oxygen once lived in the heart of a star that is now long dead. That calcium in your bones? That iron in your blood? The same.
Billions of years ago, there was no Earth, no sun, nor even a solar system. There was just a relatively featureless cloud of gas and dust, hundreds of light-years across. Pretty much in stable equilibrium, that cloud could persist for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. But given just a little nudge — perhaps by a nearby supernova going off, sending its blast wave echoing through the nascent cloud — it quickly fragmented, folding in on itself in a complicated tangle of knots and streams.
Pockets of gas pinch off and catastrophically collapse, in some cases reaching such incredible densities and pressures that nuclear fusion begins deep in the heart of a young system: This is the birth of a star .
The shattered remains of the cloud organize themselves into a disk. The disk spawns planets that cannibalize more material as they grow and compete for space around the new sun. In fits and starts and collisions, and in migrations and bursts of intense radiation, the leftover debris is cleared from the system, leaving a family: a star (maybe two), a few rocky planets, gas giants, asteroids and frozen leftovers in the outskirts.
A solar system is born.
- See more at: The Stars Within Us: Why Everything in You is Stellar
