Hydrogen and helium formed in the early universe; heavier elements were forged later in stars and scattered when those stars died. That single sentence compresses billions of years, but it frames a useful truth: the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, and the oxygen you breathe have long biographies written in spectra, supernovae, and merging neutron stars.
Popular language calls this being “made of stardust.” The poetry is accurate enough for a headline, yet science adds texture: not every atom passed through the same kind of star; isotopes preserve clocks and trajectories; interstellar chemistry links grains, ice, and radiation. Origins, here, means nested processes—cosmic, planetary, biological—each leaving signatures we can sometimes read.
When you next see a clear night sky, you are not looking at scenery alone. You are looking at a workshop logbook—one we continue to decipher with telescopes, models, and a little humility about how much remains unknown.