By looking to the stars we can understand where we came from and how we came to be. Dr Jan Eldridge explains how the different death throes of stars create what's needed for life.

By looking to the stars we can understand where we came from and how we came to be.

Dr Jan Eldridge explains how the different death throes of stars create what's needed for life in a talk at the University of Auckland's Raising the Bar night.

Listen to the talk

We're all made of stardust

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,

Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night.

- Juliet in William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet.

If we are all made of stardust, which stars have to die to make it? All the complex elements needed for life - like carbon, oxygen and iron - are made by stars as they die.

In this talk, Assoc. Prof Eldridge explains how the processes by which the different death throes of stars create different elements for life.

In the last few years, scientists have discovered that rare elements such as gold and silver are formed in the events where stellar corpses collide, showing that even dead stars can enrich the universe.

By looking to the stars we can understand where we came from and how we came to be, as all life on Earth is linked to the universe.

Dr Jan Aldridge

Dr Jan Eldridge is an astrophysicist, Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Physics in the Faculty of Science. She studies exploding binary stars (while exploding the myth that gender is also binary). Her main research interest is the lives and deaths of stars, especially binary stars - from those in our own Galaxy to those in galaxies at the edge of the observable Universe.

This session was broadcast in association with the University of Auckland's Raising the Bar night, held in August 2022

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details