We Are Stardust Stellar Evolution and Our Cosmic Connection

This concise and accessible book explains one of the most profound and inspiring discoveries ever made, namely, the fact that we ourselves¿and all we see around us¿are a natural product of the workings and wonders of the Universe, tied directly to distant events spread across space and time reaching back to the beginning, back to the Big Bang, and continuing through the birth and death of successive generations of stars. Modern science has shown that, in a very real and profound way, we are intimately connected to the Cosmos: we are, as Joni Mitchell tells us in her song Woodstock, stardust¿in a very real sense, children of the stars¿star folk made from chemical elements (¿starstuff¿) cooked by nuclear reactions in stellar furnaces throughout the various stages of stellar evolution. Life as we know it is an inevitable consequence of the life cycle of the stars. Our story begins at the beginning with the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago when, during the first three minutes in the hi