What are we made of? Where do the atoms that make up our body come from?

Most of our body (96%) is made up of 4 elements (in green in the model): Oxygen (65%), Carbon (18.5%), Hydrogen (9.5%) and Nitrogen (3 ,2%). The rest of our body is made up of an additional 23 elements, with 9 of them (in yellow in the model) making up most of the remaining 4% of our body. The Hydrogen (H) was synthesized immediately after the Big Bang, all the others inside massive stars and low mass stars; boron (B) is the result of the action of cosmic rays. Finally, these infinitely small building blocks were spread throughout the universe through powerful stellar winds and supernova explosions, the end point of massive stars and white dwarfs belonging to binary star systems or the results of neutron stars mergers.

So … we are all made of recycled material, the dust of stars.

Credit: the human body is derived by a model developed by vistaalienprime.