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The Trifid Nebula - a potential analog for the kind of place our Sun was formed in 4.5 billion years ago (NASA/ESA)
In lieu of a proper post I thought I'd link to a recent video courtesy of SpaceLab at YouTube. In it you can watch a rather unshaven and scraggly version of me answering a simple but terrific question about the debt we owe to stellar nucleosynthesis. This issue also leads us to think about the other stars that formed from the same clumps of heavy-element enriched material that our solar system condensed out of, since any worlds around those long-lost sisters could contain the very same elemental spice as us. Somewhere out there in the galaxy there might just be other organisms connected to us through the massive stars that forged our common mix of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and everything else - the ultimate stellar gene-pool.