This Is Natural Color as It Appears From Space. Again
Stars that go supernova are responsible for creating many of the elements of the periodic table, including those that make up the homo torso.
Planetary scientist and stardust adept Dr Ashley King explains.
'It is totally 100% true: about all the elements in the human body were made in a star and many take come through several supernovas.'
Most of the elements that brand up the human body were formed in stars
The first generation of stars
We think that the universe started 13 or xiv billion years ago, with the Large Bang. At that point just the lightest elements existed, such as hydrogen, helium and minuscule amounts of lithium.
Elements are affair that cannot be broken down into simpler substances. On the periodic table, each element is distinguished by its atomic number, which describes the number of protons in the nuclei of its atoms.
The offset generation of stars formed equally lumps of gas drew together and eventually began to combust. This would crusade a nuclear reaction in the centre of a star.
The first stars that formed after the Big Bang were greater than 50 times the size of our Dominicus.
'Inside stars a process takes place chosen nucleosynthesis, which is basically the making of elements,' Ashley says. 'The bigger the star, the faster they burn their fuel.'
The kickoff stars burned their fuel apace and were able to make only a few elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. When those stars went supernova and expelled the elements they had produced, they seeded the next generation of stars.
Scientists can tell the temperature and age of stars from their colour. Hotter stars burn down blueish, while cooler and older stars burn red.
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the infrared 'glow' of the gas and dust band surrounding Nebula RCW 120 in Scorpius © NASA
The next generation of seeded stars were then able to produce other, heavier kinds of elements such as carbon, magnesium and nigh every element in the periodic table. Any element in your body that is heavier than atomic number 26 has travelled through at least one supernova.
'So it'due south very likely that there are a whole bunch of different stars that take contributed the elements we see in our own solar arrangement, our planet and those institute within you.'
The life wheel of a star
The burning that takes place inside stars draws on a huge amount of fuel and creates an enormous amount of energy.
'Stars are immense objects - over 99% of the mass in our solar system is in our Sun - and gravity squeezes them. Meanwhile, the called-for inside a star creates free energy which counteracts the squeeze of gravity which is why our sunday is stable.'
Stars stay in this equilibrium with gravity until they run out of fuel.
'When that happens to really large stars y'all can become some really, really spectacular supernovas,' Ashley says. 'Our own Sun won't be anywhere nigh as dramatic as that.'
thirty Doradus, besides known every bit the Tarantula Nebula, is a large, star-forming region in a nearby galaxy. Well-nigh 2,400 massive stars in the middle of 30 Doradus produce intense radiation and powerful 'winds' of ejected material. Ten-rays are shown in blue, produced by superheated gases, resulting from supernova explosions and stellar winds. The multimillion-caste gas carves out giant bubbles in surrounding cooler gas and dust. © NASA
When stars die and lose their mass, all the elements that had been generated inside are swept out into infinite. And then the next generation of stars form from those elements, burn and are once more swept out.
'This constant reprocessing of everything is called galactic chemic evolution,' Ashley says. 'Every element was fabricated in a star and if you combine those elements in different means you tin can make species of gas, minerals, and bigger things similar asteroids, and from asteroids you can first making planets and and so you get-go to brand h2o and other ingredients required for life and and so, eventually, the states.'
'This process has been going on for something similar 13 billion years and our solar organisation is thought to accept formed merely 4.five billion years ago.'
Astronomers have combined several Hubble Space Telescope exposures to assemble this view of the Hawkeye Nebula 'Pillars of Creations'. The pillars pictured are five light years tall. The colours highlight emissions from several chemical elements. Oxygen emissions are blue and sulphur orange, and hydrogen and nitrogen appear green. © NASA/ESA/HHT
Stargazing through fourth dimension
Large stars last for a few one thousand thousand years, while smaller stars more than 10 billion years.
'You tin't actually watch a star form and see what happens in real time. When yous wait at the stars through a telescope what yous're seeing probably happened millions of years ago,' Ashley says. 'You tin tell some things about their make-upwards based on colour and temperature, but not everything.
'In 1987 at that place was a supernova that really made it possible for scientists to watch and tape a band of material being ejected, only this kind of occurrence is rare.'
Captured by NASA's Spitzer Infinite Telescope in 2011, this prototype of the Northward America Nebula shows a cluster of young stars (about one million years quondam) © NASA/JPL-Caltech
The other fashion to study the life cycle of stars is past finding samples of catholic grit and observing them through an electron microscope.
Invisible to the homo center, a single speck of this very pure, original stardust (known as a pre-solar grains, considering they are older than our Sun) is but a few microns in size - 100 times smaller than the width of a human being hair.
A single pre-solar grain viewed through an electron microscope
'We notice it in the really, really pristine, primitive meteorites that were never contradistinct on asteroids in the early on solar arrangement,' Ashley says. 'Information technology is like looking for a needle in a whole field of haystacks.'
Substantially, a scientist must accept a tiny flake of a primitive meteorite and deliquesce 99.9999% of it until they're left with a residue of silicon carbide, graphite and nanodiamonds. Things that are made at high temperatures in the atmosphere of stars are resistant to acid and therefore left behind.
So are we really made of stardust?
Nigh of the elements of our bodies were formed in stars over the course of billions of years and multiple star lifetimes.
However, information technology's also possible that some of our hydrogen (which makes up roughly 9.5% of our bodies) and lithium, which our body contains in very tiny trace amounts, originated from the Large Blindside.
Source: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-we-really-made-of-stardust.html
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