For this semester's IA Project I decided to do something involving one of my passions: art. In order to do this, I decided to use mixed media in order to portray the following message: We are all stardust. Why? Because in the end, no matter the color of our skins, the freckles in our cheeks, the god we pray to if we even do or the culture we come from, we are all moving. We are all living in the cycle of life. We are all part of the universe. We are all stardust.

You might be thinking that this sounds like a line from a poem, but it's more than that. We are all made out of stardust because almost all elements on Earth have been formed at the heart of a star. Stars have light due to the energy released by nuclear fusion in their cores. These reactions are the ones that create chemical elements such as carbon or iron (essential elements for life on Earth). The Big Bang caused tiny particles to bound together in order to form hydrogen and helium. Clouds of gas and dust (nebula) gathered due to gravity, heating up and becoming denser. This created stars. At the core of the star (temperatures over 10 million degrees C) hydrogen and helium nuclei fuse in order to make heavier elements. Once they run out of fuel (hydrogen) they turn helium into beryllium and carbon. This reaction is known as nucleosynthesis. This reaction continues in stars today as light elements turn into heavy elements and this is how most of the elements on Earth have been created. Supernovas (massive star explosions) disperse different elements across the universe, making up all the planets including Earth.

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