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The Highlights (Lesson 2)
"Stars mimic living systems. They are born, live to maturity at metabolic rates determined by their masses, and die, spewing forth the matter by which their stellar offspring can take form. Throughout, they convert the light atoms of their birth into the heavier ones dispersed at death. The chemicals that constitute our beings were manufactured in the bowels of stars that today exist only as memories." — George A. Seielstad, "Cosmic Ecology," 1983.
Red Giant stars Antaries in Scorpio, Betelgeuse in Orion, and Arcturus "arcing" from the Big Dipper actually look reddish to the naked eye.
Our scientific understanding of the origin of CALCIUM in our bones is as fantastical a story as the notion that one might combine the contents of a child's balloon (HELIUM) with grains of sand (which include SILICON) and voila! There be calcium! Yet this is precisely what happened inside an ancestral star. The build-up of complex atomic nuclei from the simpler comes to a dead halt with IRON. Iron builds up in the core of a star. Every atom of IRON within our blood was at one time inside the core of a star and gumming up the works, so to speak. As more iron forms, the star cools, becomes less luminous, and then gravity takes over. Everything collapses, then rebounds in a SUPERNOVA EXPLOSION. All of our "precious metals" (GOLD, SILVER, PLATINUM) were created in that supernova explosion. When a single star explodes as a supernova, it shines brighter than 100 galaxies for several days, and it remains BRIGHTER THAN ALL THE STARS IN A SINGLE GALAXY for about 3 or 4 months. The more MASSIVE a star is, the faster it "burns" — and thus the SHORTER ITS LIFE. The biggest stars may live for only 50 million years. Stars SMALLER than our Sun may live for hundreds of billions of years and create nothing more complex than helium. The greater the CREATIVITY of a star, the shorter its life.