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Stellar Nucleosynthesis

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The magnificent object in the sky, which illuminates our world; our Sun, is only one of many of the infernos in space we call stars. As it happens, we can actually thank all of these entities for the creation of our planet, our race, and ultimately life itself. As with most science, its of course not as simple as the statement “We are made of Stardust”, but there is certainly a great deal of credibility to that statement. That credibility ultimately boils down to a process called “Nucleosynthesis”. Stars created all elements, except Hydrogen, which was created after the Big Bang. On the list of elements created by Stars are Carbon, which is the base of life, and Oxygen which sustains life. Along side it is the reality, that just as Stars created …show more content…

The statement is true (roughly 60% of our bodies our Hydrogen). Returning to our document How much of the human body is made up of stardust?, it mentions “Now it turns out that of those billion billion billion atoms [the atoms in a human body], 4.2*10^27 of them are Hydrogen…That leaves 2.8*10^27 atoms of stardust. Thus the amount of stardust atoms in our body is 40%.” But one could also deem it misleading. After all Hydrogen (as the simplest element) is lighter then any other element. Once you recalculate, 7% of our bodies mass are Hydrogen. Later in the text, it then mentions: “Even though water [60% of the human body is water] consists of two Hydrogen atoms for every Oxygen, Hydrogen has much less mass. We can conclude that 93% of the mass in our body is …show more content…

Carbon is what all life is based on. Oxygen sustains life. We most certainly would have not lived had our universe not been guested by Carbon and Oxygen. As mentioned on NYU.edu, Carbon is “…a very special element because it plays a dominant role in the chemistry of life” Elaborating on an earlier point, our planet was lucky enough to have not just the elements the directly grant us life, but also the elements that indirectly grant us life. The advantages Humanity has been gifted with came from Stardust, meaning we can further credit stars for our existence. Stardust is in the food we eat (like Carbon), the air we breath (like Oxygen), the water we drink (like Oxygen again), and the blood in our veins (like Iron). Although Stardust was created from Hydrogen, and most of the universe is Hydrogen, one must remember that our planet, our race, and ourselves were created from the other elements that arose afterwards in stars. So one could conclude that just as we were made from Stardust; Stars were made from Big Bang dust. We are connected to the objects created a bit after the origin of existence. A very majestic truth in

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