Why human bodies are made of supernova explosions

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Image result for supernova explosions
Supernova explosion
Why human bodies are made of supernova explosions
By: Bell Muthukumaran


                      According to a recent study, more than half of the atoms that make up our bodies have formed beyond the Milky Way galaxy. These atoms probably came from giant exploding stars and traveled to our galaxy through speedy galactic winds. The Royal Astronomical society laid out this conclusion and researchers there also made a simulation to see what would happen in billions of years after the stars that make up galaxies die. The fate of the star at the end of it's life depends on its size. Large stars explode, so the shoot matter out into space. The largest of stars result in supernova explosions. It's almost impossible to think of the scale of these explosions. They send more than trillions of atoms into space at a tremendous speed. The matter travels in gigantic galactic winds, these winds can cover large distances before getting sucked into a new galaxy. They might travel up to a million light-years. A single light-year is the distance that light is able to travel in one year, which is about 5.88 trillion miles. A million hours is an unthinkable distance. When matter hits other galaxies, it is absorbed. This way, galaxies can grow and shrink, with matter constantly moving between them. Astronomers have known for a long time that elements inside of stars can travel from one galaxy to the next. The reason this is so important is because this is the latest research to prove that up to half of the material in the Milky Way and similar-sized galaxies may have arrived from smaller neighboring galaxies. 
                                              The material itself is a mix of various elements. Some of it is hydrogen and helium, which tend to usually form new stars when they fall into new galaxies. Heavier elements, on the other hand, tend to form comets, asteroids, planets, and sometimes even life. "Science is very useful for finding our place in the universe" said one of the researchers, Daniel Anglés-Alcázar. He is an astronomer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He explained that even though the Milky way is our home, we're just visitors here. What makes up most of our world comes from other galaxies. The researchers there ran some supercomputer simulations to watch what happened as galaxies evolved over billions of years. They noticed that as stars exploded in smaller galaxies, the blasts ejected clouds of elements.
                                                                                                                                               These elements fell into larger galaxies nearby. The simulation led to a surprising finding which was that each year, our own galaxy can absorb an amount of material that weighs about as much as the sun. Claude-André Faucher-Giguère is also an astronomer on the team. He said that before their simulations,  galaxies were thought to grow mainly by absorbing material left over from the Big Bang. “What we did not anticipate, and what’s the big surprise, is that about half of the atoms that end up in Milky Way-like galaxies come from other galaxies,” he said. “It gives us a sense of how we can come from very far corners of the universe.” The computer models dramatically sped up the intergalactic changes. The researchers were able to create animations showing whether stars in a galaxy formed from material already existing in the galaxy, or from huge clouds of has that fell in from neighboring galaxies.

I believe the future of this field is that scientists will discover even more about our origins and they might even be able to pinpoint exactly where we came from. Our origins are still pretty blurry because we just started to figure out about this.             

https://newsela.com/read/made-of-stars/id/33278/
Image result for galaxies
A galaxy

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