I’ve been watching reruns of Discovery Channel’s series How the Universe Works on the Science Channel lately. It’s totally blowing my mind!
I did take physics in high school and college, but I don’t remember it being anywhere as awesome as this program is. Maybe I’m just late to the party, but being a physicist is probably one of the coolest jobs in the world…or the universe (second only to writing, of course!).
The other night I stayed up late to watch an episode about supernovas (exploding stars) and then a second one about stars in general. I learned something that made my skin tingle: We are all made of stardust.
That’s right. When you look up in the sky at night and see those twinkling burning balls of gas, you came from that. Are you wondering How is that possible? I could try and explain how when a star explodes it shoots out the elements that create pretty much everything in the universe, but the Discovery Channel does a much better job of it in this video.
As if it weren’t enough to realize you’re a star-child, here’s another video about just how tiny we are relative to the largest known star. We’re talking size on a level that I can’t even really imagine (and I have a pretty endless imagination).
Okay, now that my mind has been blown apart, I wonder what kind of beings its dust will create?
