When we think about the building blocks of our bodies, we often think about the various cells that constitute it. But that’s not the extent of it, not even close. If you dig deeper, you will find that even a tiny cell is made up of trillions of atoms.

It is estimated that there are tens of trillions of cells in the human body. So, you can only imagine how many total atoms we are all made up of. The number is just too big to even try and think about. All that inside a single human.

We rarely think about our bodies in terms of it’s chemical composition but when we do, it opens up an entirely different way of looking at life and I dare say, that it is quite beautiful.

Did you know that almost 99% of our body’s mass is made up of only six elements? These are oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus. But that’s not the interesting part at all. The surprising thing is that these elements that make up our bodies, were made inside stars!

We Are Cosmic Soup

There are about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe and each contains hundreds of billions of stars. Many of these stars serve as the nuclear furnaces to forge several elements.

Bigger stars, that are orders of magnitude larger than our sun, are able to manufacture even the more heavier elements in their core. When these stars die, they explode into some of the universe’s most violent explosions, known as Supernova.

During this phenomena, all those elements inside the star is scattered throughout the surrounding of those exploding stars. The elements that we are made of also came from such explosions. Beautiful isn’t it? One star dying and making life possible.

If you think about it, our bodies are just cosmic soup, with ingredients taken from all over the cosmos and finding their way into one single human body.

An Inter-Galactic Soup?

It is such an eye-opening realisation that ancient stars in our Milky Way galaxy could have kickstarted the process of origination of life on Earth millions or perhaps billions of years ago.

But a new study takes this one step further and claims that half of the atoms in our bodies may have come from outside the Milky Way, travelling across vast distances in space thanks to galactic winds.

The team at the Northwestern University also said that supernovas occurring in one galaxy can be powerful enough that the expelled atoms could easily escape their galaxy’s gravity and find a new home in another one.

These trillions of tons of atoms could then give birth to planets and asteroids and the lighter elements like hydrogen and helium could give birth to stars even, starting the process of forging the elements all over again.

A Phenomenal Existence

Often at times I think about how tiny we are compared to everything that’s out there. It might make one feel as though they are meaningless in the face of the entire existence.

But then considering that we are made up of the very things that also make up other things in the universe, is quite phenomenal. I am reminded of what Carl Sagan famously had said about this.

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

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