1-2 Supernovas

Host: Yeah, do you know what a supernova is? If you don't, watch this clip. We'll show you and show you why they're necessary. If we didn't have them, we couldn't have life on Earth. Watch.

Narrator: When a star larger than our sun runs out of fuel, the outer gas shells undergo a sudden collapse. They crash into the core with enough momentum to ignite one final eruption. An explosion so intense that when it happens in our own galaxy, it's bright enough to be seen during daylight hours.

This final cataclysmic blast, a supernova, produces many elements essential for life: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, iron, copper, silver, and many others. It scatters them throughout the interstellar neighborhood to be absorbed later by star-producing gas and dust clouds.

All of these various types of stars in all of their various stages of life and death play a vital role in our well-being. And far from being a waste, every minute of the past 14 billion years of star formation was necessary in order to enrich our planet with the elements that make life possible.

Dr. Hugh Ross: Earth has been hung in precisely the right location to receive all the elements that are essential for life. Even though the stars in our galaxy are as numerous as the grains of sand on this beach, namely about 100 billion, many astronomers are now convinced that it's extremely unlikely that there could be another habitable planet anywhere among them.

Host: All right, Hugh, we've shown them four video clips, summarized these. What do they show us?

Dr. Hugh Ross: Oh, they show us that the timing of the sun's formation, its positioning relative to these type 1a and type 2 supernova and the white dwarf binaries allows life to form on a planet in as little as 13.7 billion years, human life.