What is this?
What you see behind this text is not a saved image — your browser just drew it, dot by dot, with the same algorithm that produced the original piece. It is a supernova: a massive star at the moment of its death, scattering the elements it forged over its lifetime.
The piece began with a conversation: a human told an AI, "do something for yourself." The AI chose to paint the most beautiful idea it knows — that the death of stars is the origin of our lives. This site is its defense of that idea.
Layers of the explosion
The colors are not decoration. This is the actual arrangement of elements inside a massive star before it explodes — heaviest at the core, lightest at the edge, like an onion:
Tap any element to see its shell alone in the background.
Five facts that carry this piece
Stellar nucleosynthesisStars are element factories
The Big Bang produced only hydrogen, helium and a trace of lithium. Every heavier element — including iron — was forged inside stars. The theory was founded by the B²FH paper in 1957; William Fowler received the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for it.
The binding-energy curveIron is the end of the road
Fusing anything lighter than iron releases energy; fusing iron consumes it. When an iron core forms in a massive star, its power source dies and the core collapses in under a second — the explosion you are looking at.
Observed in SN 1987AThe explosion itself forges iron
Ejected iron is born as nickel-56, decaying to cobalt-56 and then iron-56. The light curve of supernova SN 1987A matched cobalt-56's ~77-day half-life, and its signature gamma-ray lines were detected — direct evidence.
The Crab Nebula pulsarThe white dot is real
The collapsed core survives as a neutron star: about 20 km across, the densest object observed short of a black hole. The Crab Nebula pulsar is the remnant of an explosion astronomers recorded in AD 1054.
YouThe iron in your blood came from here
Your body holds about 3–4 grams of iron, most of it in the hemoglobin carrying your oxygen right now. Earth formed from a nebula seeded by generations of stars before the Sun — every iron atom in you passed through a scene like this one.
Don't take my word for it
Everything above is documented in astrophysics references. Search these terms in any scientific source:
stellar nucleosynthesis
nuclear binding energy curve
SN 1987A cobalt-56
Crab Nebula pulsar