Video Transcript: We are Star Stuff

Our universe is mostly Hydrogen.   If you remember back to anytime you've learned about science in the past, I'm guessing the Periodic Table was a part of your education.   The first picture in our gallery is the Periodic Table, arguably one of the most important charts in all of science.   It shows all of the elements out of which all of nature is made, these are the building blocks.  

Number one, on that Periodic Table is Hydrogen.  And it's the most abundant gas or element in the entire universe.  Number two is Helium.  And that's the second most abundant in the universe, about 74% of our universe is Hydrogen.  24% is Helium.    If you add those together, you get 98% of our entire universe is Hydrogen and Helium.  It's pretty amazing.  

The question can be asked, though, well, what about all these other elements?  You know, where are those at?  Where did they come from?  What's going on here?  

Now, clearly, God is responsible for creating all of the building blocks out of which He constructed the whole universe.  What's amazing, though, is that there's a mechanism that God has put into the universe, a process built in, where Hydrogen and Helium can be converted, and turned into these heavier elements that make up the Periodic Table, and that are so essential for life.  

You know, in the last video, I mentioned how God is still in the process of creating not only the baby inside my wife's stomach, and my four-year-old son, but He's still in the process of creating me, physically, because the food that I eat, through these mechanisms is converted into the flesh of my body.  Isn't that so striking?  I can't help but think of communion and the Lord's Supper, and how in Christ says, “Take this bread and this wine, this is my flesh,” we think of that in such spiritual terms.  But it's so striking that in physical terms, the food we consume becomes the flesh of our bodies.  Isn't that amazing?  

In the same way, Hydrogen and Helium, through these processes are creating heavier elements.  So when I say there are natural processes or mechanisms, I view that as God actively working in the process of still creating His universe through these natural and mechanical processes.  God is saying, do it, and the universe is doing it.  That's how I think about it.  

The amazing thing is, this process, turning Hydrogen and Helium into heavier and heavier elements, it really only happens inside of stars.  Inside of stars.  Amazing.  And it's particularly amazing when we consider the fact that my body is mostly water.  That's Hydrogen, but it's also Oxygen.  Oxygen … where is it here… number 8 on the Periodic Table.  That's a heavy element, relatively speaking.  

All of the structures of my body, the fats, and the proteins and all of those things, they depend on Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Carbon.  And there's some other things, too, that are important.  So Nitrogen, where is that … that's number 7 on the Periodic Table.  Carbon, that's number 6.  

These have to be made from Hydrogen and Helium, and they are being made inside stars.  So the atoms, literally the elements that make up my body, the skin, the water, the blood, those elements were once inside a star.  I mean, that's our current science understanding is that the literally the material of my body used to be inside of a star.  And what we're going to look at this video is the process of turning Hydrogen and Helium into those materials and getting it out of the star.  

We've already seen a little bit of how it gets out of the star with these giant explosions.  But this is our best understanding of where these heavier elements that all of life is made out of, where they've come from.  So, let's look inside of a star.  

And we have some simple models.  And all of this is going to depend on the mass of the star, so, we'll see that as we go.  And you'll see that in more detail in your reading as well.  

Okay, so let's start here.  A star, this is the second picture in the gallery, a star, maybe like our Sun, it’s a big ball of Hydrogen gas.  And that Hydrogen gas is compressed via the force of gravity.  And eventually it gets compressed so much that fusion begins; the temperatures and pressures in the center of the star are so great that nuclear fusion begins.  

We're not going to talk in depth about the process of nuclear fusion.  I think for our purposes, we'll suffice it to say that you take a Hydrogen and another Hydrogen, you push them hard enough together, and they turn into a Helium.  And they give off some energy.  And the point here, though, is that Hydrogen, Helium, Carbon, Oxygen, they're all made up of the same basic things, which is protons, neutrons and electrons.  

And if you can change how close those protons get together, if you push them close enough together, and those neutrons together, then they'll start sticking together.  And that's when you get a new element formed.  It’s when those protons and neutrons in the nucleus [boomp] eventually stick together, give off a ton of energy, and some electrons are going around.  That's the core of what an element is.  

And if you can somehow change the number of protons in the nucleus, you're changing the element.  And the only way to really do that is to get them so close together, that they want to stick together, which requires tremendous pressures, tremendous forces.  But when you do that, and they go [bink], they stick together, a little energy is given off.  And if you get that happening a lot, then a lot of energy is given off.  

Okay, and so that's what's creating this energy, this nuclear fusion inside the Sun.  And so, you’ve got this Hydrogen gas, pushing really, really hard, and towards the middle of the Sun in the core, you get that Hydrogen turning into Helium.  You get an envelope, we would call it, kind of like a shell of Helium that's just been formed.  

So you can see here in the second picture, it's called a Hydrogen burning shell.  The Hydrogen is burning into Helium.  And then what's beneath it.  Inside the core, there is the heaviest stuff.  Now Helium is a little heavier than Hydrogen.  And so the Helium is down there in the middle of the core.  Alright, so they're calling it Helium ash.  

Now, as you've seen like a log burn and the fire kind of makes its way across the log and you can see ashes left behind.  That's essentially what's happening for a star.  It just begins in the middle and works its way out.  And it goes as far as it can but sometimes it could die out.  If the force and pressure isn't enough to drive nuclear fusion, then it might just stop and you're left with the ash in the middle, and this Hydrogen burning to Helium.  That's kind of all you get.  

But if the star is big enough, the mass is great enough, if the gravity is strong enough that you're compressing even more than that Helium gets compressed so much, that it can start to fuse as well.  Now, this requires tremendous temperatures, like insane.  Helium doesn't burn until it reaches like 500 million degrees Kelvin.  Enormous temperatures.  

But when that happens, you can see something like this third picture in the gallery, which shows now we've got more layers into our star.  We've still got the Hydrogen outer shell.  We have that layer where the Hydrogen is burning into Helium.  And now we have a layer where that Helium is now burning into the next element in the chain, which is Carbon.  And now the Carbon ash is sitting there in the center.  

So you might ask, can Carbon burn into anything?  Well, yes, it can if you get even greater temperatures, which means you need a bigger and more massive star, then you can have Carbon burn into heavier and heavier things.  

So let's just say you got the most massive star imaginable.  The biggest star.  You think it can burn anything because it's got so much gravity.  Let's take a look at that.  That would be the fourth picture in our gallery.  

So here you've got the Hydrogen still on the outside; the Hydrogen is burning into Helium.  The Helium is burning into Carbon.  Well, that's not going to stop it's so hot, the Carbons burning into Oxygen, the Oxygen is burning into Neon.  The Neon is burning into Magnesium which is burning into Silicon, which is burning into Iron.  

And no matter how hot you get inside of star, you cannot get Iron to fuse into anything.  

Iron has a unique configuration of protons, electrons and neutrons that it doesn't give off any energy when you go through this process of nuclear fusion.  So you cannot get anything heavier than Iron.  

So an element like Gold, for example, you know, there's Gold on Earth, somehow Gold got here; where did it come from?  Our best understanding then of where heavier elements, elements that are heavier than Iron can come from, is when you have two stars like these, the ashes left these iron leftovers, when you have those things collide with each other.  Or when you have tremendous explosions, like these enormous supernovas that happen.  Only in those extreme circumstances can you get the energy required to get past Iron into these heavier elements which are around.  We know they're here, so we have to find a way to explain where they come from.  

So this is this process through nuclear fusion of how heavier and heavier elements can be made.  Now, so many of these all the way up until Iron…  I mean, iron is in my blood, it's a part of what's in my body.  So somehow it has to get out of these stars, if it's going to get into the next generation of stars.  And that's where we see these amazing explosions like we saw before.  And here's a cool way of seeing that.  

So we have here, this is the last picture in the gallery, on the left hand side you see like an ultraviolet picture of a star, like the Sun.  This is a picture of the Sun.  But we've cut away to show the layers that are inside there.  Well, when a star explodes, just like you saw the Ring Nebula, you could see the different colors.  You could see there's the Hydrogen, the Oxygen.  Well, we can see that with supernovas as well, because these are really massive stars.  The ones that form all the way to Iron are really massive.  So when they explode, it's a big explosion, like a supernova.  And there's a lot of energy.  

So the image on the right is an X-ray image.  And the colors are showing the different types of materials that can be seen inside that explosion.  So these materials are then being blown out into space, they start mixing with other gas and nebulas and eventually, that stuff starts to collapse back down, form a new star, the dust and stuff, the heavy stuff, maybe is out there spinning around in the disk that goes into forming the planets.  

So you start to see a picture of how this amazing way in which, starting with the simplest atom, Hydrogen, just one proton and one electron, you can build more and more complicated elements and eventually, you can build things even that are that are seemingly unbuildable, like beyond Iron and then you can get them into a new star and a new planet.  

It's an amazing story.  It's almost too crazy to believe, to be honest with you.  But the evidence that we observe suggests that this is how, this is what has happened.  We can see older stars and we can see newer stars.  Older stars seem to not have as many of these heavier elements, the first generations of stars, they don't have them, but later generations have more and more of these heavier elements.  So it seems to be the case that over time, the stars are creating more and more of these heavy elements.  

Okay, good stuff, challenging stuff.  But you know, I think it comes down to, from a spiritual perspective for me, as challenging as some of this information is, especially when I think about God crafting people and how, you know, it's challenging to think about God using these kinds of mechanisms, perhaps, I don't know how I feel about that, to be honest with you.  But where the consistency comes, where I say, Yes, this is, this is consistent with what I know about God and about humanity is there's this tension that we read in those first Bible verses, which is, “what is man that You care about us.  We are the dust of the earth, we're nothing, but you have elevated us,” God has elevated us to this position, where we are special in some way.  

And I see that tension here in the observations from astronomy.   Yes, these are just dust and ashes and nothingness, but it came from this unbelievable place … that the flesh of my body used to be in the stars in the sky.  That's just like crazy!  But it's consistent with this view of what God thinks of us and how He has crafted us in an amazing way.  So, a lot to consider; a lot to think about, but I hope you enjoy thinking these deep thoughts with me.  

Okay, we'll see you next time.