“We are stardust”. This poetic expression linking humankind to the stars refers to the fact that the stars are the factories of the Universe in which most of the matter making up Universe and indeed ourselves is produced.
This video shows how the stars produce a variety of nuclei in their cores and how the catastrophic end of some of these starts creates the heaviest nuclei.
The star Betelgeuse, belonging to the constellation of Orion and mentioned in the video, recently experienced a vertiginous fall in its brightness of about 40%, dropping it from the 8th brightest star in the sky to the 21st! Some explanations for this phenomenon are given in this press release from the ESO (European Southern Observatory).
For more information: All known chemical elements are classified on the periodic table of elements, also called the “Mendeleyev table”, after the Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleyev who, for the first time, classified the elements in table form in 1869. Explanatory video with Lucile Anthore, chemistry researcher at CEA.