World News for Students of English

01-05-2025 07:00

Everything around us, including our bodies, is made from material that stars created billions of years ago.

Ancient stars produced elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron, and when they exploded, these elements spread across the universe. Later, they came together to form planets, trees, and even humans. Stars form in cold molecular clouds, which are huge collections of gas and dust. Inside these clouds, gravity pulls material together into dense clumps. When these clumps collapse, they heat up and form protostars. As time passes, these stars begin nuclear fusion, turning hydrogen into helium.

Stars spend most of their lives as main sequence stars, steadily burning their fuel. A star’s mass decides how fast it burns and how long it lives. Small stars can live for trillions of years, while massive stars live only a few million years. When a star’s fuel runs out, it either becomes a white dwarf or explodes in a powerful supernova, creating neutron stars or black holes.

Through these processes, new stars and planets are born, continuing the cycle of life across the universe. Carl Sagan famously said that we are a way for the universe to know itself, showing how deeply connected we are to the cosmos and the stars that came before us.

Difficult words: clump (a group of things that stick close together in one place), protostar (a small star), cosmos (the universe).

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