Everybody is a star. Remember that 1970 hit by Sly and the Family Stone? It’s actually true. Each one of us has a little bit of the stuff that stars are made of within us.
Since you have iron in your blood and calcium in your bones, you have star stuff in you. Even the gold and silver in your wedding ring was part of a star eons ago.
All heavy elements in our universe are the result of supernovas, giant stellar explosions that bring a cataclysmic end to massive stars.
Astronomers and other scientists agree that supernova explosions are the only way that heavy materials like gold, silver and uranium can physically form.
When a star begins to run out of hydrogen fuel in its core it swells, becoming a red giant star, many, many times larger than its original size.
Through the course of a star’s life, hydrogen atoms fuse into heavier helium atoms inside the core of the star. This is called nuclear fusion. When the hydrogen inside the stellar core is exhausted and there’s nothing left but helium atoms, the helium core then begins to collapse due to gravity.
This produces a tremendous amount of heat that then fires up nuclear fusion in the outer layers of the star. This results in the entire star bloating out into a red giant.
This will happen to our sun in about 4½ to 5 billion years, and when it does our sun will balloon out so far that it will swallow up the two closest planets. Say goodbye to Mercury and Venus.
Earth won’t be safe, either, because the sun’s bloated outer edge will be close enough to boil away the oceans.
An average star like our sun remains as a red giant for about a billion years till it runs out of nuclear fuel. Then it begins to gravitationally collapse into a white dwarf star not much bigger than Earth. It becomes a retired star that eventually flickers out completely.
More massive stars, about eight times more massive, meet a much more violent end. These stars go through normal lifetimes and become super huge red giant stars.
Betelgeuse, the second brightest star in the constellation Orion the Hunter, is one of these.
Now visible in the southeastern evening skies, Betelgeuse marks the armpit of Orion. Its diameter is about 400 million miles, but it regularly balloons out to a billion miles around.
Sometime within in the next million years, or maybe even just a few thousand years, Betelgeuse will exponentially explode beyond biblical proportions in what astronomers call a supernova.
Supernovas are triggered as super giant red stars like Betelgeuse develop iron cores as they lose their ability to produce energy through nuclear fusion.
When the star explodes, the stellar shrapnel flings out in all directions at speeds more than 10,000 miles a second. The heat of this explosion cooks heavier elements like gold, silver and uranium. This cooking process is more formally known as nuclear synthesis.
Materials including heavy elements spread out so far that seed surrounding clouds of developing star clusters and solar systems.
Our own solar system was laced with heavy elements from a supernova billions and billions of years ago.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a major supernova explosion in our part of the Milky Way galaxy. The last major one was in A.D. 1054. Nearly 1,000 years after this big blast the remnants are still visible but much fainter. It’s called the Crab Nebula, and it’s next to one of the horns of the constellation Taurus the Bull.
Scan that part of the sky with a small to moderate telescope and see if you can spot the faint little patch of light that once was a mighty star, 39,000 trillion miles away.
Mike Lynch is an astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, “Washington Starwatch,” available at bookstores and at his Web site www.lynchandthestars.com.
The Everett Astronomical Society welcomes new members. Go to www.everettastro.org/.
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