WE ARE MADE OF STARDUST - IT'S A FACT

It is not a legend, it has been actually demonstrated by Fred Hoyle, Britain's best known astronomer and physicist (until Stephen Hawking). A fascinating and controversial personality, Professor Sir Hoyle pioneered multiple researches and wrote groundbreaking science papers, causing major disputes in the scientific world with his revolutionary theories.

The most important was his discovery,  together with the American physicist William Fowler, in 1957, of the way that the heavy elements found in the human body  - such as Oxygen, Carbon, Iron - were created by nuclear reactions inside the stars which, in a later phase, exploded and from whose relics the solar system was born. He called this process nucleosynthesis. In other words, we are literally made of stardust.


However, this epochal discovery triggered an immense controversy and, ultimately, Fowler, not Hoyle, was the one rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

Hoyle also was the one who coined that the term 'big bang' theory - which describes how the universe was created in a cataclysmic explosion and has been expanding ever since - was flawed. In his opinion, the big bang could not have taken place unless space and time already existed. This led him to propose a 'steady-state' universe in which matter is continually generated by a yet unknown mechanism. In 1994 he wrote, 'Big-Bang cosmology refers to an epoch that cannot be reached by any form of astronomy, and, in more than two decades, it has not produced a single successful prediction'.

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