The stars are lovely and magnificent. Without stars human beings wouldn’t exist. Animals and flowers wouldn’t exist. Just about everything on Earth, including Earth itself, wouldn’t exist had starts decided to not so lovingly explode and give us the essential elements needed to produce us.
The elements the stars give off are carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron and just about every other element essential to create life and allow it to evolve. That is the beauty of the universe right there. Without stars, nothing would matter. Had the stars that were created after the big bang not explode via supernova I would not be here to right about it.
But stars are more mysterious than we know. Most of our knowledge about stars come from our own star, the Sun. We’ve learned that some stars can be as small as having a circumference of 25 miles, which are called neutron stars. These stars come into existence after a star supernovas. All remaining energy and circumference of these red giants violently collapses and turns into these neutron stars. The amazing this is how these neutron stars contain the same mass as they normally had in their earlier years (millions of years prior in the stars existence).
The larger stars we can experience are call supergiants. One supergiant named Betelgeuse is 650 times larger than the Sun. This star are so massive compared to our own son, that if you drew it on a standard piece of computer paper, our own Sun would be no larger than a tiny little spec. Now imagine looking up into the sky and seeing a sun 650 times larger up in the sky. I think it’s pretty safe to say that star would take up the entire sky.
Here’s something else to imagine: there are 70 sextillion stars in the known universe. That is 70,000 million million million stars (or 10^22 stars). The scary thing is that there could be more… many more. We know for a fact that there are stars so far away from us that light simply hasn’t had the time to reach us yet. This is incredibly difficult to imagine but it’s true! If there are 10^22 stars, you’d have to imagine that there are even more planets than that.
Look up at the night sky. Pick out dime-sized part in the sky and take the most powerful telescope on earth and look straight out into the sky. You’ll be able to see at least 10,000 galaxies. Now, a star dies and supernovas in a galaxy once every hundred years. That’s really rare, isn’t it? But if you look into that one small part of the sky, you can see anywhere between 10 to even 100 plus stars exploding on a given night. The odds of things happening are always in our favor. So while it may be 1 in a billion, or even a trillion, that life started on Earth, look at how big the universe is. While 1 in a billion may seem like an incredibly, incredibly unlikely and rare circumstance, we live in a universe where rare things happen all the time. We just need to be grateful it happened to us.
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