Star Death

So, from star birth we get star death. That follows, sure as…um… death and taxes. These things move in cycles. Starbirth regions almost always have some elements created by the deaths of the stars that went before them. Much as dying vegetable matter seeds a field here on Earth with the essential nutrients for the next generation of plants and animals, old stars recycle themselves into interstellar space. The elements they leave behind—carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, on up to silver, gold, and iron, and even the radioactive elements like thorium and uranium—get re-used in newborn stars and planets. It’s a pretty efficient mechanism for the universe to re-create itself through the billions of years it has existed, and it will continue for as long as there are stars to give off material.

Of course, the most famous stardeath sites are supernovae, particularly the kind known as Type 1a, which occur when massive stars explode and hurl their outer layers to interstellar space.

There are other ways for stars to die and pass on their “legacy” of elements to the cosmos. The Sun won’t die as a supernova, but it will swell up to become a red giant. Much of its mass will get blown off to space, and THAT mass will also be recycled into new stars a few billions of years from now. There’s evidence that material from several dying stars provided the seed material for the Sun and planets, which puts us and our home world smack in the middle of the cosmic cycle of life and death.

Regions of stardeath are nearly everywhere we look in our own galaxy and in countless other galaxies, too. They look remarkably similar, a testament to how the laws of physics and astrophysics work across time and space.