Are we ashes of the stars?

Question

Are we ashes of the stars?

Answer 1

Yes. to add to what the others have said, even our Sun is a "by product" of an older giant star (a metal poor population II star). It is a "young" population I star.

Answer 2

Absolutely.  The big bang created nothing but hydrogen and helium.  Perhaps some lithium.  Angela S is the first person in a long time to confirm what I had read years ago but could never verify again.  Anything with a higher atomic weight is created in stars.  It doesn't get released until the star blows up.  Blowing up in a supernova creates all the atoms above iron.

Answer 3

Yes, we are. We are partly made from star dust.

Answer 4

no

we are nuclear waste left over from novae

Answer 5

As per Carl Sagan it is yes.

All heavy elements were cooked up inside stars.

So Calcium in our bones,iron in our blood  all are star products.

Answer 6

Yes we are the product of the debris ejected from a super nova.

Answer 7

In a way, yes we are.  But saying we are literally children of the stars is more poetic.

When the star runs out of hydrogen fuel, it begins feeding off of its helium fuel, fusing together to make heavier elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.  Hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and even carbon are among the most common elements in the human body.

When the star runs out of helium, it collapses upon itself and goes nova because it no longer has the power to fuse these heavier elements, and the heaviest is iron.  This in turn makes even heavier elements all the way up to uranium, plutonium, and so forth.

Answer 8

Yes

in the big bang only hydrogen and helium (and a teeny bit of lithium) were made.

All other elements are made inside stars.

The mass of you body is only 10% hydrogen, with negligible helium and lithium - so 90% of your mass was once part of a star.

ADDED - stars don;t have to explode to eject their newly made elements. AGB stars do it a lot without exploding - but most of the atoms in your body would come from supernova explosions because they are more efficient at building heavy elements.

MORE ADDED: you got a few answers that are just wrong, so here's some info on stellar evolution and where heavy elements come from:

For a star like the sun, during the red giant phase, the core of Helium is collapsing and there is a hydrogen burning shell around it. Once the helium burns (horizontal branch phase), there is a carbon core which collapses, and it is surrounded by a helium burning shell and a hydrogen burning shell - this is the asymptotic giant branch or AGB phase. The carbon core cannot continue to collapse because of degeneracy pressure.

Heavy elements are made inside stars - but they do NOT have to be massive stars that supernova

Neutron capture is the key to building elements heavier than iron.

Neutrons are neutral and so there is no electrostatic repulsion when trying to add neutrons.

In a star that goes supernova many neutrons are freed and can be injected into nuclei. This process happens so fast that nuclei become full of neutrons and unstable, so they decay radioactively. The path by which they decay depends on what the element started as and how many neutrons were added - but this process, known and the r-process (rapid process) leads to a certain distribution of isotopes.

However, it is a myth that lower mass stars, like the sun, cannot build elements heavier than carbon. Inside an aging low mass star neutrons get produced and neutron capture can occur. In this case, the neutron density is much lower, to the process is much slower (s-process). This leads to a different set of isotopes than the r-process!

These low mass stars lose their newly made elements much more slowly than massive stars and the ejected material is what eventually forms planetary nebulae.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-process

and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-process

Only stars between about 0.8 and 8 solar masses become AGB stars. This is because above this mass, the core of the star gets hot enough and dense enough to overcome electron degeneracy, so the carbon core collapses and fuses into heavier elements and thus it doesn't become and AGB star. The precise mass limits are actually metallicity dependent.

Stars up to about 8 solar masses do not explode as supernova or nova unless they have a binary companion (which the sun does not).

These low mass stars lose material over a few hundred thousand years to become planetary nebulae, with a white dwarf in the center illuminating the ejected gas (and dust).

The reason that electron degeneracy is less of an issue if the core gets hotter is because at higher temperatures the electrons can have a larger distribution of speeds, and thus can be packed closer together (remember - Pauli Exclusion principle says that speed and position can't be the same, but if you have more speed options, more electrons can occupy the same space)

Above 8 solar masses, stars explode as supernovae after the red giant phase. Basically they don;t stop at carbon burning, because the high temperature in the core allows them to overcome electron degeneracy. Consequently the keep going with successively heavier elements fusing until the make iron. Once they make iron they cannot produce energy through fusion, so the core collapses and rebounds to cause a supernova explosion.

Between 8 and 15 solar masses the remnant of the explosion ends up as a neutron star; above about 15 solar mass, the remnant collapses catastrophically to become a black hole

Answer 9

I used to believe that bunk when I was an atheist block head.

Just get saved and repent now while you still can.

And do NOT accept this:

http://www.verichipcorp.com/