We come from space.
That is where the ingredients for everything you see and touch were made.
Every element in the periodic table.
Their origins track the evolution of our universe.
In its earliest moments, the cosmos is so hot it is ingredients only -- energy and the
most fundamental building blocks of matter.
In those first hot moments, protons and neutrons formed, and then merged into the first elements.
Hydrogen is the first, a single proton that later plays host to a simple electron.
It is the most common element in the universe, and all of it is created in the first three minutes.
It is at this time that most of the universe's helium also emerges, along with
a miniscule fraction of lithium.
After a few hundred million years, clouds of diffuse hydrogen gas condense into
the first stars – massive by today’s standards.
They live fast, die young, and begin to seed the universe with many elements
of the periodic table.
As those first, massive stars age, grow old and die, new stars form in their wake, including
less massive stars more familiar in the canvas of the night sky.
Generations of stars follow, changing the elements' abundances as they
cycle through their lives.
At stellar cores, under intense heat and pressure, hydrogen atoms fuse into helium.
Over time, heavier elements form, from the carbon that will one day enable life to
the iron in our blood and skyscrapers' steel.
These reactions produce energy that supports the stars against their own
gravitational collapse—and make the stars shine.
When their fuel runs out, they explode in supernovae.
For some, incredibly dense neutron stars are left behind, while others collapse even further
into black holes.
Some stars are born as twins – partners who orbit each other from birth,
and live out their lives together.
If they become neutron stars, and eventually collide, they explode and create even heavier
elements, such as gold, platinum and even uranium.
But even after such catastrophic events, the periodic table is still not complete.
To create several of the remaining elements requires extreme environments, such as those
surrounding supermassive black holes that lie at the heart of many galaxies.
Surging forth in opposite directions from the superheated material surrounding the black
hole are cosmic rays -- protons and heavier elements accelerated to near
the speed of light.
Colliding with other elements, cosmic ray fission produces most of the low-mass boron,
as well as beryllium and some lithium.
Within several hundred million years, all the elements of the natural world have appeared.
. . and now continuously recycle and reprocess.
All the elements of galaxies,
comets and asteroids
planets . . . . . . and life.
Now, we, like the stars, can create elements, even ones that never existed on Earth before,
like fleeting oganesson, which holds a massive 118 protons in its nucleus, although
only for fractions of a millisecond.
It is the heaviest element known . . . until the next generation of scientists finds
yet others, and the periodic table continues to grow.