We are all remnants of star dust. A majority of what you see around you is made of components that once belonged to a star. Many of you may have taken chemistry, whether it was at QC or in high school. For the entire semester, you stared at the mysterious box of periodic table of elements. As you eventually learned, these are the fundamental elements that compose of everything we see on the Earth. But did you ever ask the question where these elements came from? The answer is not the earth, but from stars.

Stars are formed when dense clouds of stellar gas are accumulated by gravity. As the cloud of gas becomes denser, the pressures and temperatures in the center of the cloud rise dramatically and initiate a process called fusion. Hydrogen, the first periodic table element, is the main ingredient for star formation. In fusion, hydrogen atoms gain huge amounts of energy causing them to slam into each other. If there is enough energy, two hydrogen atoms colliding with each other will stick to form Helium and give off huge amounts of energy in the process. Fusion is what gives the sun energy.

The process continues causing more Hydrogen to slam into each other, and eventually causing Helium atoms to slam into each other. This progresses up further along the periodic table and fusion allows the sun to manufacture more elements up until iron. When the star has exhausted all of its hydrogen, the star collapses in on itself, causing temperatures to skyrocket. All of this pent up energy is then released and the sun explodes its rich elemental guts into the universe. This phenomenon is called a Supernova. These elements scatter across the universe to form new stars or find their way to new planets.

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