The star dust inside us all
When our Sun was formed 5 billion years ago, temperature reached 15 million celsius. In a chain of nuclear reactions, atoms of carbon released enormous amounts of energy, creating the building block life. The carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen from which our own bodies are made were created billions of years ago. Similar elements can be identified in the fragments of meteorites that have crash-landed on Earth and which are our closet records of conditions in the early Solar System.