PREVIOUS EVENTS

The saying that we are all made of stardust is largely true: except for hydrogen, all the atoms in our bodies were forged in the cores of stars that died millions of years ago. For example, most of the carbon was made inside stars similar to our Sun. As these stars died, they expelled the material they had created into space by means of a gentle stellar outflow of dust, which became the building blocks for a new generation of stars and planets. By following these dust particles in their journey from a dead star into a new planet and studying their chemistry along the way, we can find out about the origins of life on Earth.

Marie Van de Sande is a research fellow at the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Leeds.