Tag Archives: stardust

Neil de Grasse Tyson: “For me it’s the greatest gift that modern astrophysics has given civilisation: In 1957 a research paper was published demonstrating that the atoms in your body; the nitrogen, the iron, the carbon – all of this are traceable to cosmic crucibles deep in the centres of stars – it manufactures them by thermo-nuclear fusion. The star explodes and scatters that enrichment into gas clouds that make the next generation of star systems… such as we. So it’s not like you’re out in the universe looking up and you say “I’m alive in this universe but I feel small: no; the universe is alive within you and you should feel large! That revelation that we are not poetically, but literally stardust, borders on the spiritual and I think everyone – it is their duty to know that.”