We Are Made Of Stardust

Question: Are we really made of stardust?

Answer: Yes, we are all made of stardust.

Everything we are and everything in the universe and on Earth originated from stardust, and it continually floats through us even today. It directly connects us to the universe, rebuilding our bodies over and again over our lifetimes. Everything inside your body like your bones, organs, muscles are made of various molecules and atoms. Every element in the periodic table aside from hydrogen is essentially stardust. Our body is composed of roughly 7×10²⁷ atoms.  Out that of those billion billion billion atoms, 4.2×10²⁷ of them are hydrogen. Remember that hydrogen is Big Bang dust and not stardust. This leaves 2.8×10²⁷ atoms of stardust. Thus the amount of stardust atoms in our body is 40%.

Living with the Stars tells the fascinating story of what truly makes the human body. The body that is with us all our lives is always changing. We are quite literally not who we were years, weeks, or even days ago: our cells die and are replaced by new ones at an astonishing pace. The entire body continually rebuilds itself, time and again, using the food and water that flow through us as fuel and as construction material. What persists over time is not
fixed but merely a pattern in flux.

We rebuild using elements captured from our surroundings, and are thereby connected to animals and plants around us, and to the bacteria within us that help digest them, and to geological processes such as continental drift and volcanism here on Earth. We are also intimately linked to the Sun’s nuclear furnace and to the solar wind, to collisions with asteroids and to the cycles of the birth of stars and their deaths in PHI15SCImic supernovae, and ultimately to the beginning of the universe.
Our bodies are made of the burned out embers of stars that were released into the galaxy in massive explosions billions of years ago, mixed with atoms that formed only recently as ultrafast rays slammed into Earth’s atmosphere. All of that is not just remote history but part of us now: our human body
is inseparable from nature all around us and intertwined with the history of the universe. Read more

Since stardust atoms are the heavier elements, the percentage of star mass in our body is much more impressive. Most of the hydrogen in our body floats around in the form of water. The human body is about 60% water and hydrogen only accounts for 11% of that water mass. Even though water consists of two hydrogen atoms for every oxygen, hydrogen has much less mass. We can conclude that 93% of the mass in our body is stardust.

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Source:

Physics Central

National Geographic