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Re: stars upon thars

THANK YOU.  that was incredibly helpful.  and very interesting.  and has 
certainly led to another question or two-

pardon my ignorance-

so, do stars just spontaneously combust?
why do the clumps form in the gasses?  are the little gas bits just lonely?

i think this is all very fascinating.  i don't see it fitting into my 
creationist upbringing, but it's very interesting.

thank you!

melanie




>From: Don Smith <dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu>
>Reply-To: Don Smith <dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu>
>To: Over-the-Rhine at actwin_com (Over the Rhine List)
>Subject: Re: stars upon thars
>Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 15:51:37 -0400 (EDT)
>
>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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By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, 
penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, 
whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.

- Teilhard de Chardin


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