Ideas worth spreading

TED@NAS

November 2019

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Your body was forged in the spectacular death of stars

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz

We are all connected by the spectacular birth, death and rebirth of stars, says astrophysicist Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz. Journey through the cosmic history of the universe as Ramirez-Ruiz explains how supernovas forged the elements of life to create everything from the air you breathe to the very atoms that make you.

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This talk was presented at a TED Institute event given in partnership with The Kavli Foundation, the Simons Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

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Shoot for the stars. Donate to Lamat and help bring bright young scientists, who were previously unrecognized, into the field of astrophysics.

We are all connected by the spectacular birth, death and rebirth of stars, says astrophysicist Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz. Journey through the cosmic history of the universe as Ramirez-Ruiz explains how supernovas forged the elements of life to create everything from the air you breathe to the very atoms that make you.

This talk was presented at a TED Institute event given in partnership with The Kavli Foundation, the Simons Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Read more about the TED Institute.

Shoot for the stars. Donate to Lamat and help bring bright young scientists, who were previously unrecognized, into the field of astrophysics.

About the speaker

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz

Astrophyscist, stellar mortician

See speaker profile

Looking not at the heavens but at computer models, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz studies some of the most powerful explosions since the birth of the universe.

Mitchell Begelman, Martin Rees | Cambridge University Press, 2009 | Book

Gravity's Fatal Attraction: Black Holes in the Universe

This book provides a vivid picture of why astrophysicists do what we do.

Jorge Luis Borges | Isha Books, 2013 | Book

The Library of Babel

The book constructs a metaphorical replica of the universe, causing me to first reexamine my notions about cosmic time.

Sean M. Couch | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 2017 | Article

"The mechanism(s) of core-collapse supernovae"

This article from my colleague Sean M. Couch, who kindly provided me with the simulation presented in my talk, provides a clear description of our current understanding of supernova explosions.

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