From Dust to Dust
BigM16
We are star dust..
Stars form from the gravitational collapse of interstellar gas and dust. Stars live and then die when they finally run out of fusion fuel at their centers.
Upon death, stars return most of their material to the interstellar medium. However, this stellar material is laced with an abundance of heavy elements, created in the fusion reactions that took place at the center of these now dead stars.
This continual cycle of
star formation,
stellar evolution,
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and stellar death,
serves to enrich
interstellar space with `heavy' elements, such as Oxygen, Carbon, and Iron,
without which, life could not form..
As we have noted above, the region between the stars in a galaxy
like the Milky Way is far from empty. These regions have very low
densities (they constitute a vacuum far better than can be produced
artificially on the surface of the Earth), but are filled with gas,
dust, magnetic fields, and charged particles. This is commonly termed
the interstellar medium.
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