Stardust

I haven’t thought about stardust recently, but an interview on Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air” brought it to mind when she spoke with astrophysicist Brian May. Some of you might remember May for his career before he obtained a doctorate in astrophysics. May spoke about the preponderance of dust in the universe. Every astrophysical event creates dust, he said, the explosive supernovae events in particular.

Brian May: “We human beings and all animals and all plants and everything on the Earth are made of the dust that has come out of supernovae. So when Joni Mitchell said, ‘We are stardust, we are golden,’ she was right. We are stardust and I find that quite an amazing thing to think about. The material of our body did come from the inside of stars.”