Interest
We Are All Star Stuff
By TREVOR O’DONOGHUE
predominantly or other. With hydrogen with a bit of luck, a sprinkling of that gold will helium. Stars be found and are powered end up as a by nuclear watch or a ring reactions adorning a turning this finger. A long hydrogen way indeed into helium from the fiery and then into cauldron of its gradually birth in a stellar heavier explosion elements, billions of years including ago. carbon, nitrogen, and Iron. Beyond Carl Sagan - “We are all star stuff” this, the heavier elements in our universe Carl Sagan summed it up nicely; including gold, silver and so on are ”Our Sun is a second- or thirdformed in supernova explosions generation star. All of the rocky and other cataclysmic events like and metallic material we stand on, neutron star collisions. These the iron in our blood, the calcium in explosions scatter the newly our teeth, the carbon in our genes formed elements such as gold far were produced billions of years and wide, where they eventually ago in the interior of a red giant may find a home on one planet star. We are made of star-stuff.”
One of the rarer celestial events to have been observed from Earth happened in 2017 when scientists observed two neutron stars colliding in a galaxy 130 million light years from Earth. Not only that, but the power of the collision set up gravitational ripples in space-time, which eventually made it to us here on Earth. Like many things of the cosmic variety, it is hard to wrap our brains around the power and scale of such events. A neutron star is already the result of a stellar explosion. They are formed when a large star, at the end of its lifetime, blows itself to bits in a stellar explosion known as a supernova. This is an event so powerful that the light from this explosion can outshine the rest of the stars in its galaxy, which may well be in the order of few hundred billion stars. In this instance, what remains, the neutron star, is so dense that a teaspoon of it would weigh 10 million tons. Just for context, that’s about 10 million Ford Fiestas!!! In a teaspoon!!! These supernovae and neutron star collisions are not just bright, they also serve a useful purpose. When the universe was A supernova scatters chemical elements throughout the universe. formed, it was
Issue 65 June 3rd, 2022
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