Remember the late ’70s hit, “You Don’t Have to Be a Star (To Be in My Show)” performed by Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr.?

Well, like it or not, we’re all stellar, literally! The iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones, and the gold and silver you may be wearing were all forged out of an unknown star that exploded eons ago.

In fact, all heavy elements in our world or any other were exclusively cooked up in the colossal explosions of huge stars. These explosions are also known as supernovas. Astronomers and scientists agree that this is the only way that these elements could physically come into existence.

Every star in our Butler sky, including our sun, are basically huge balls of hydrogen gas held together by gravity. Since they are so massive, a star’s gargantuan gravitational force greatly compresses the ball of gas.

This compression forces a huge amount of heat to build up in the core of the star, to the tune of millions of degrees. That drives the hydrogen atoms at each other hard enough that they fuse together into heavier helium atoms. The details are really hairy, but when that happens, it produces tremendous amounts of light and other radiation. This is the process of nuclear fusion.

As stars age, hydrogen atoms become depleted, and helium atoms begin to pile up. When the hydrogen has totally run out, the helium core begins to get squished due to gravity.

This compression dramatically drives up the core temperature even more, and the expelled heat fires up nuclear fusion in the outer layers of the star. This causes the entire star to bloat out into what’s known as a red giant.

This is going to happen to our own sun about five billion years from now. When it does, bad things will happen. The sun will swallow up the planets Mercury and Venus. The edge of the sun won’t be all that far away from Earth. Needless to say, our world will get fried and never be the same.

After another billion years or so, when the sun completely runs out of nuclear fuel, gravity will totally take over. Our home star will collapse under its own weight and get compressed into a white dwarf star. The sun will be down to about 8,000 miles in diameter by then, about the size of Earth. Eventually, the new white dwarf will flicker out, and Earth and the remaining planets will orbit a dead star.

Much larger stars, at least eight times the mass of our sun, will meet a much more violent end. As they run out of hydrogen in their cores, they become superhuge red giant stars.

An example of a super red giant star is Betelgeuse, the second brightest star in the winter constellation Orion the Hunter. It marks the armpit of the great celestial hunter. Betelgeuse is at least 400 million miles in diameter, but occasionally expands out to about a billion miles in girth. It’s probably the biggest single thing you’ve ever seen.

No one knows for sure when it will happen, but sometime within the next million years, Betelgeuse will explode in unimaginable proportions. It will go supernova.

There’s no way I can get into all of the details, but essentially what happens is that stars like Betelgeuse develop iron cores due to excessive levels of nuclear fusion. Hydrogen fuses into helium that fuses to heaver carbon and oxygen atoms, and that trend of fusion continues until iron is forged.

At that point giant stars like Betelgeuse become unstable and literally blows themselves to bits. During this annihilation matter is strewn violently in all directions at speeds over 10,000 miles per second. At the same time, heavier elements like gold, silver, uranium, and many others are “cooked up” in all of the heat and chaos in what’s called nuclear synthesis.

So how did all of these elements make it to Earth and eventually into our bodies? Astronomers believe our sun and other stars form as giant hydrogen gas clouds gravitationally collapse. The cloud that formed our sun and the solar system was laced with heavy elements from a supernova. Possibly multiple supernovas were involved.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had a major supernova explosion in our neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy. The last one recorded was way back in A.D. 1054. We know that because Chinese astronomers documented it. It was said to be so bright that it was visible during the day for almost a month.

Nearly 1,000 years later the remnants of this supernova explosion are still visible but considerably fainter. It’s called the Crab Nebula, located in the horns of the winter constellation Taurus the Bull. With a moderate telescope you can see a faint patch of light that way back in the day was a mighty star over 37 thousand trillion miles away.

You and everyone you know is made of star stuff, so make your life shine!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is also the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at adventurepublications.net. Contact Mike Lynch at mikewlynch@comcast.net.