If you’re driving while listening to this, please think of your vehicle not as a mere car or SUV, but as a starship cruiser!

Here’s why: the iron it’s made of came from the heart of a distant star.

Stars begin their lives as giant balls of gas, mostly hydrogen, the first element on the periodic table, with one proton.

Under the force of the proto-star’s enormous gravity, hydrogen atoms fuse together to produce helium, with two protons.

This nuclear fusion releases a huge surge of energy, and the star is born.

Hydrogen continues to fuse into helium, releasing more and more energy.

Helium atoms then fuse into carbon atoms, which fuse into silicon atoms, with each subsequent element being heavier.

All this nuclear fusion releases more energy than it takes to fuse the atoms together. And so, the process continues, for millions of years…until the elements fuse into iron.

At that point, it would take more energy to fuse iron into something else than the resulting reaction would produce.

So fusion stops, and the star begins to die.

Soon, the gravity of its iron core becomes so strong that the star collapses on itself, then explodes outward in a supernova, scattering iron across the universe…which eventually forms planets like ours. And our cars.