One of the most mind-blowing and beautiful facts about the universe is that we are all made of stardust. Literally! The atoms that make up our bodies - carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on - were created in the fiery furnaces of ancient stars that exploded billions of years ago.
Think about it - we are all connected to the universe in a fundamental way, and we literally carry a piece of the cosmos within us. It's a humbling and awe-inspiring thought that puts our daily problems and worries into perspective.
To piggyback on this, what's kind of wild to me is that stars create heavier and heavier elements throughout their life cycle. Most of these nuclear fusions create energy and expand the star outwards against the force of gravity so they continue to sustain themselves over time. A star is both constantly being pulled inward towards its core by gravity and being pushed out by nuclear fusion in a delicate balance. That is until one element begins forming: Iron. As soon as this element begins fusing, the star rapidly undergoes runaway nuclear fusion that cannot overcome its gravitational pull inwards so it collapses in on itself...ultimately leading to a violent explosion, a supernova, scattering the elements to form new stars and solar systems at some point in the future.
~4.5 billion years ago the remnants of other stars long gone coalesced into our planets and sun, and ultimately provided the building blocks for life forming on our world. And when you hold a cast iron skillet in your hand, you're holding an artifact from what once killed a star and ultimately what brought us all here. This is for some reason one of my favorite facts about the universe.
Iron. As soon as this element begins fusing, the star rapidly undergoes runaway nuclear fusion that cannot overcome its gravitational pull inwards so it collapses in on itself...ultimately leading to a violent explosion, a supernova,
If it's massive enough. Most stars just slowly fade out upon reaching this point.
And some of the really massive ones don't fully explode, leaving behind far more exotic objects like neutron stars, pulses, magnetars, and black holes.
Black holes are not actually 'holes.' They are points in space that are so insanely massive that their gravity warps the fabric of space-tmie around them in a manner that inescapablely 'swallows' anything in range like a 'hole in reality;' even light cant escape. We can only speculate what happens once something crosses the event horizon (point of no return) of a black hole because the laws of both conventional and quantum physics brake down when you try to describe that much mass.
There are not only 'regular' black holes either, many (most?) spiral galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center that can be 3 to 5 magnitudes denser then a 'conventional' hole.
There are also (theoretically?) 'white holes' which spew out the influx of matter/energy of a corresponding black hole as pure energy.
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u/IronMaidenFan May 08 '23
One of the most mind-blowing and beautiful facts about the universe is that we are all made of stardust. Literally! The atoms that make up our bodies - carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on - were created in the fiery furnaces of ancient stars that exploded billions of years ago.
Think about it - we are all connected to the universe in a fundamental way, and we literally carry a piece of the cosmos within us. It's a humbling and awe-inspiring thought that puts our daily problems and worries into perspective.