I have been told that I am dust
but I have never been told that I am STARDUST.
Is this only poetic language?
Let us look at this photo taken in 2014 by the Hubble Space Telescope which reveals nearly 3,000 distant galaxies and millions of stars hidden in a portion of the sky that seems blank and empty. We know that the beauty of the Universe is unfathomable. The concept of 100 billion suns, each of them a star within one of the 100 billion galaxies is beyond our imagination.
Contemporary research awakens us to the discovery that we come from the stars. We are stardust! But how can we be so sure?
At the time of the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago, hydrogen and helium were released; clouds of these gases condensed into the first stars and galaxies. In their nuclear alchemy, the stars released heavy elements which became the elements of life. That is what made our own existence possible. Amazing! In fact, we were born from the stars. Our life, so precious and so fragile, originated from the stars!
We are stardust, miniature universes gifted with the mysterious faculty we call consciousness. As we look at the soil beneath our feet, let us be aware that we stand on the blue planet, next to a yellow star we call Sun. Let us contemplate the Milky Way in this vast cosmic space containing billions of galaxies. We can say with Hubert Reeves and other scientists: “This is home.” Or to quote Pope Francis in Laudato ‘Si, this is “our common home”.