We live on a cosmic dust bunny – a planet built from grains of dust made of elements forged in the stars.
A star “fuses” lightweight elements in its core to make heavier ones. The process begins with hydrogen, the lightest and simplest element, followed by helium, the next element.
Near the end of its life, a star like the Sun makes carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. When the star dies, it expels some of these elements into space. Stars that are more massive than the Sun make even heavier elements, all the way up to iron. These stars die in titanic explosions that build even heavier elements.
And collisions between massive stellar corpses forge some of the heaviest elements of all – things like gold and uranium. All of these elements blow out into space, where they can be incorporated into new stars and planets.
As these elements move outward, they can stick together to form solid grains, known as dust.
Our solar system was born from a giant cloud of gas and dust. Most of its material formed the Sun. But some of the leftovers formed a disk around the Sun. Dust grains in the disk stuck together to make bigger and bigger chunks.
Close to the Sun, these chunks coalesced to form Earth and the other inner planets. Farther out, they formed the cores of the planets, which then pulled in much of the leftover gas. So Earth and the other worlds of the solar system are cosmic dust bunnies – materials created by the stars.
Script by Damond Benningfield