I feel like iron in the blood gets a lot of airtime, but literally all the carbon in our bodies is star stuff too. As is the oxygen making up the water. And almost everything else.
> This result therefore paves the way towards a direct measurement of the solar metallicity using CNO neutrinos. Our findings quantify the relative contribution of CNO fusion in the Sun to be of the order of 1 per cent;
I find it amazing that we can analize the composition of the core of the Sun measuring the energy of the neutrinos.
(Photons are not useful, because they bounce a lot of times before escaping from the Sun, so they provide only information about the outher layers.)
A hot, expanding, fully ionized plasma. Over weeks to years it cools, recombines into ions/neutral atoms, forms molecules in some regions, and a fraction condenses into dust grains, often as iron-bearing compounds like FeS and as inclusions in silicates.
> liquid iron is sitting around radiating its tail off
With the energy imparted by the cataclysmic devastation of a supernova I'd assume it's a plasma that cools and sublimates into a gas. These clouds of gas typically have magnetic fields that can bring particles close together where they form dust/grains.
Is that meant to be good? I always chuckle when people make these kind of statements. Is the association to cosmic objects meant to make you feel better about something? I personally don't find stardust particularly interesting. The fundamental forces of nature on the other hand are much more appealing to me.
I believe it’s quite common for people to marvel at the vastness of the universe. For that reason, people might like the tangible link that they feel to the rest of the universe when they think of this - it’s amazing to think of how small we are in it, but also amazing to think of where “we” came from.
