We are made of star-stuff. Few scientific ideas have had as much cultural staying power as this one, which Carl Sagan popularized in his 1980 TV series Cosmos. The phrase has become almost like secular scripture, quoted in hundreds if not thousands of books, splashed across T-shirts and totes, inked onto skin, and repeated at weddings.
Sagan intended the phrase to be understood in a very literal sense. According to modern astrophysicists, the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, and the iron in our blood, were all forged in the interiors of collapsing stars, and subsequently circula