Stargazing Guy

– Joni Mitchell, Canadian-American musician, producer, and painter

At the dawn of the universe, there was a whole lot of hydrogen and helium, a little bit of lithium, and not much else. This is consistent with the standard or “big bang” model.

Between 12 and 13 billion years ago, massive amounts of hydrogen and helium have coalesced to form suns.

The centre of these stars are under immense pressure. As stars mature the really dense core gets really, really hot —100 million degrees. That’s where carbon (and other elements, such as zinc, phosphorous and sulphur) start forming.

But to actually produce carbon, even inside stars, requires quite an unlikely set of events and some split-second timing.

Beryllium is formed when two helium atoms are bashed together – if a third helium atom hits the beryllium (which only lasts a millionth of a billionth of a second) carbon is formed.

So these suns were generating huge amounts of carbon (and oxygen, etc) in their cores. But all suns eventually burn themselves out.

And if they’re large enough, they explode in a catastrophic supernova.

The supernova scatters atoms and molecules (that are cooked up inside the star before it explodes and as a result of the explosion) into the galaxy where they’ll collect into gas clouds, that become the nursery of a next generation of stars.

The first stars in the Milky Way started forming over 13 billion years ago.

The Earth didn’t make an appearance until around 4.5 billion years ago.

Most of the carbon that makes up us and the Earth and all of the life around us comes from the inside of stars that went supernova.

Life on Earth is carbon-based. About 12 per cent of our bodies are made up of carbon. The other major elements are hydrogen and oxygen – with smaller amounts of other chemicals.

Looks like Joni Mitchell was right-on, “We are stardust, billion-year-old carbon”.

PS: I love coffee. BuyMeACoffee, leave a message with a date and time and we can share it, remotely, at the same time, and think about the Cosmos.

In the meantime, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else, too, because as Adam Smith said, “we naturally desire not only to be loved but to be lovely”.