My Science School

From the biggest whale in the ocean to a tiny mouse, all life on Earth has one thing in common – it is all made from the same stuff.

Stardust

Nearly everything that makes up our bodies, and everything else on Earth, was created when dying stars exploded. These explosions send raw materials like carbon and oxygen hurtling across space, and these raw materials are what we are made of. That means that you are made of stardust! When the universe started, there was just hydrogen and a little helium and very little of anything else. Helium is not in our bodies. Hydrogen is, but that's not the bulk of our weight. Stars are like nuclear reactors. They take a fuel and convert it to something else. Hydrogen is formed into helium, and helium is built into carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, iron and sulfur—everything we're made of. When stars get to the end of their lives, they swell up and fall together again, throwing off their outer layers. If a star is heavy enough, it will explode in a supernova.

So most of the material that we're made of comes out of dying stars, or stars that died in explosions. And those stellar explosions continue. We have stuff in us as old as the universe, and then some stuff that landed here maybe only a hundred years ago. And all of that mixes in our bodies.

Picture Credit : Google