What are stars?
Despite their ubiquity in our universe, their praises often go unsung. A friend admitted to me once that he hadn't realized -- you know, really viscerally realized -- that our sun was itself a star until he was in his twenties. From that moment forward, however, every glance at the night sky bowled him over with such an emotion of vast familiarity that he could hardly stand to look at it. And with just cause: every star, like our sun, is a wonder, a factory producing almost all the heavy elements floating around the cosmos -- including the everyday matter that makes up the…
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