Where your atoms came from

This is so interesting. I recently re-watched Bill Moyer's PBS interview with Joseph Campbell and what struck me was that Joseph Campbell used the existence of myths as the conduit for understanding our connectedness to the universe. That myths are our way of understanding that everything that we are made up of is in essence the universe. Powerful stuff.

And it brings me to my father... he was also very struck by this realization. He gave me the book The Power of Myth before he died. I wish I had asked my father more questions about what resonated for him - meaning, what in particular it was that struck him so profoundly. I wonder if he used the Hero's Journey to understand some of the aspects of his own life.

It is worth the watching. And now I need to go out and get the book again.

Taken from the Joseph Campbell Foundation web site.

As much as half of all the matter in the Milky Way, including the atoms that make up the human body, may have come from distant galaxies up to 1 million light-years away, reports NBCNews.com. Researchers at Northwestern and other universities used supercomputer simulations to study how galaxies evolve over billions of years. Exploding stars, known as supernovas, eject trillions of tons of atoms into space with such force that they can escape the gravitational pull of their own galaxy. Carried by powerful galactic winds consisting of gas particles from the supernova explosion, these atoms can travel across the universe at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second to another galaxy—which can then “steal” the material. It was previously thought galactic winds weren’t powerful enough to transfer a significant amount of mass from one galaxy to another. But this new analysis finds that the Milky Way absorbs about one sun’s worth of “star stuff” each year. In a very real sense, says co-author Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, “we are extragalactic visitors or immigrants in what we think of as our galaxy.”

Taken from the August 18th edition of The Week magazine.