Starstuff: Difference between revisions

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Cyanwasserstoff, Blausäure, hydrogen cyanide, a Bad Year at Treblinka: call it what you will. Triply-bonded carbons and nitrogens feasted richly on the mitochondrian iron of European Jewry, maintaining acquaintance with old friends. It is star stuff's calcium that instills a human body with form; it is stuff from that same star which erupts as osteosarcoma, that packs the body bloated and bursting with stumbling, half-mad leukemic mucilage. A tumor sinks new vessels, siphoning off food for its manic growth, and like the Sorcerer's Apprentice summons home siblings from strange aeons. Everyone you know will experience fratricide on the part of some celestial brother.
Cyanwasserstoff, Blausäure, hydrogen cyanide, a Bad Year at Treblinka: call it what you will. Triply-bonded carbons and nitrogens feasted richly on the mitochondrian iron of European Jewry, maintaining acquaintance with old friends. It is star stuff's calcium that instills a human body with form; it is stuff from that same star which erupts as osteosarcoma, that packs the body bloated and bursting with stumbling, half-mad leukemic mucilage. A tumor sinks new vessels, siphoning off food for its manic growth, and like the Sorcerer's Apprentice summons home siblings from strange aeons. Everyone you know will experience fratricide on the part of some celestial brother.


Star stuff. The emptied ash of God's smoldering bong.
Star stuff. The emptied ash of the Creator's smoldering bong.


Among the bosonic matter with which you, Constant Reader, and I are familiar, the vast majority was fused or accumulated in stars. The exceptions huddle on either side of the curve of binding energy, and indeed on the line scored by history's arrow: promordial hydrogen, both with a neutron and without. Alpha particles with sundress-clad leptons at the Helium Ball. Some trace lithium; a pinch of beryllium. Behind them swarm only quarks and gluons and inflatons and mysteries. Far along out on the other side, assembled much more recently, are the heavy transactinides, pear-shaped and lethargic from gorging on beta decay.
Among the bosonic matter with which you, Constant Reader, and I are familiar, the vast majority was fused or accumulated in stars. The exceptions huddle on either side of the curve of binding energy, and indeed on the line scored by history's arrow: promordial hydrogen, both with a neutron and without. Alpha particles with sundress-clad leptons at the Helium Ball. Some trace lithium; a pinch of beryllium. Behind them swarm only quarks and gluons and inflatons and mysteries. Far along out on the other side, assembled much more recently, are the heavy transactinides, pear-shaped and lethargic from gorging on beta decay.