Courtesy of NASA - Nearly every atom in your body originated in the fiery hearts of ancient stars or in the cataclysmic explosions that ended their lives. Hydrogen, making up about 10% of your body's mass (mostly in water), and a trace of helium trace back to the Big Bang itself, the universe's hot birth 13.8 billion years ago.
All heavier elements, however, were created through stellar nucleosynthesis. Light elements like carbon (roughly 18-19%), oxygen (about 65%), and nitrogen (around 3%) formed inside stars during their main-sequence lives and especially in their red-giant phases.
In these dense, hot cores, hydrogen fused into helium, then helium into carbon and oxygen via the triple-alpha process and other reactions. Massive stars continued this chain, producing nitrogen and other intermediates before exhausting their fuel.
Iron, crucial for hemoglobin in your blood, and lighter metals like calcium (about 1.3%) and phosphorus (about 0.6%) also arose in stellar cores, but fusion stops releasing net energy at iron. When a massive star's iron core grows too large, it collapses under gravity in seconds, triggering a supernova explosion.
This blast ejects the star's accumulated elements - including carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and iron - into space at enormous speeds, while the extreme conditions enable rapid neutron capture to forge even heavier atoms.
These dispersed remnants, enriched "stardust," drifted for billions of years, mixing into interstellar clouds. One such cloud collapsed about 4.6 billion years ago, birthing our Sun and solar system. Earth formed from this material, and life eventually arose using the same recycled atoms.
Your carbon forms the backbone of DNA and proteins, oxygen sustains respiration and comprises most of your water, nitrogen builds amino acids, and iron carries oxygen in blood - all echoes of long-dead stars. Thus, you are literally made of stardust: the universe's ancient alchemy recycled into living tissue, consciousness, and wonder.
The definitive printed record of these historic astronomical
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