These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy... Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds, that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets, and those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.
So when I look up at the night sky... I know that, yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts... is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up... many people feel small cause they're small and the universe is big, but I feel big. Because my atoms came from those stars. There's a level of connectivity.”
Annotation
File under: things that always make me cry.
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