Would You Like To Live On A Star?

That sounds nice and metaphorical, doesn't it?  To live on a star, it sounds so whimsical.  But what is a star?  We're told, it's a nuclear furnace.  We're told that in stars, the simple gas of hydrogen is transmuted into heavier and heavier elements.  The next element to be made is helium, and it progresses into lithium and beryllium and boron.  In some stars the process stops at carbon, and the star dies as a giant diamond.  In other stars the process continues until iron is formed, and the star dies as a big iron ball.

However, some stars don't end up as a mere lump of cold, dead matter.  Under just the right conditions some stars will become novas, supernovas, or even hypernovas.  These stars die a violent death.  They actually explode, and in their thundering outward blast, they simultaneously compress matter inward.  The incredible energy in the compressed zone drives the matter into higher and higher elemental states, well beyond the iron limit.  It's at this point that some of our most precious and most needed elements are created.  Elements like gold, lead, silver, copper, nickel, zinc, mercury, tin, iodine, and uranium, all of these come from supernova stars. 

By now you're wondering, why is he telling me all this?  Because, Gentle Reader (as my idol Asimov used to say), look again at the composition of this planet we call Earth.  Our scientists tell us our planet has a core of iron, the highest element to be formed in a star before it explodes.  We know that we have an abundance of trans-iron elements here, such as those listed above.  How can this be?  I would invoke Occam's razor, by suggesting that the simplest answer is likely to be the right one.  Our planet is the core of a star that underwent a supernova explosion.  We live on the outside of the core of a long-dead star.

It's one thing to understand that we are all made of atoms born of stars that existed eons ago.  It's another thing to realize that this planet is not just some haphazard conglomeration of elements.  Earth is the heart of a star, and we are made of the Earth.