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Re: stars upon thars
Hi,
Is that subject line from the Dr. Seuss book about the Star-Bellied Sneeches?
(I think that's what they were called, wasn't it?) Okay, spin off topic:
favorite Dr. Seuss book! Only one pick allowed. I think I'd have to pick
The Lorax, even though it always makes me cry. But I digress...
Melanie wrote:
> how exactly would we have evolved from stars?
It's not that we *evolved* from stars, in the sense that a house dog evolved
from a wolf. It's more like you know how they say that every time you breathe,
the odds are very good that you're breathing in at least one atom that was in
Julius Caesar's last breath? Well, each of us is made up of oxygen, nitrogen,
iron, carbon, etc. Those atoms came into our body through us eating other
creatures and whatnot, but they weren't *created* either in our bodies or in
our food. The atoms themselves totally get recycled: we excrete them in some
way or other, they go back into the biosphere, and eventually get in something
else, which then either gets eaten by something else, or rots into the ground,
etc. Occasionally a meteor adds some metals to the Earth, the solar wind adds
some atoms, and atoms from the upper atmosphere boil off into space, but by and
large the atoms that make up the Earth and its contents are the same ones there
when it formed, except through radioactive decay and cosmic ray impacts, until
we started slamming atoms together 60 years ago. So where did the Carbon atoms
in your body (and the trees outside) come from? They were formed by slamming
helium atoms together in the center of some long-gone star. They sat there
inside that star until it exploded, spewing them out into space, where they
floated as part of a huge gas cloud until clumps started forming in that cloud,
and the clumps got bigger and bigger until they formed a new star (our sun),
and its planets, and us.
You can see an exploding star throwing off gas here:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0001/casa_chandra_big.jpg
or here:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/9911/crab_vlt_big.jpg
And you can see a gas cloud clumping into new stars here:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0206/eagle_kp09_big.jpg
or here:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0102/s106_subaru_big.jpg
Is that clear? In an art-major kind of way? :-)
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
"Poppa... The more you talk, the more I don't hit the ball!" - Maddy Hordinski
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