Heavenly

I’m sure everyone has heard it before, but this is so cool that I can’t really mention this often enough.
Humans, animals and pretty much our entire planet, hell most of our solar system is made up of stuff that came out of stars which have gone supernova, exploded, kaboom.
When the universe first started, before the first stars collapsed, the only two elements that existed anywhere, were hydrogen and helium (and some traces of lithium, but we’ll just ignore that for now). Anything heavier than that was produced somewhere inside a star and many of the heavier elements (iron and such) were made in supernovae.
Thus we’re all little specks of star.

It doesn’t really get much cooler than that, now does it. Whenever people ask me why we should care about what astronomers do it’s these kinds of things I try to talk about. It is this kind of knowledge and understanding of the universe, which places our lives into a greater context I think. (Of course the physics we learn is pretty cool too :-)).