As Neil DeGrasse Tyson is fond of saying, "We are all stardust." Zooming out a bit, however, reveals that almost everything is stardust, more or less: after the Big Bang, stars were responsible for creating the heavier elements on the periodic table that eventually became the building blocks for planets, carbon-based life, and (in a roundabout way) Elon Musk. Stars are so integral to our universe that astronomers and scientists can use stars' masses, births, and deaths to get a handle on the entire history of our cosmos. And it turns out our current history may be wrong. It comes down to this: More massive stars live shorter, brighter lives before exploding into supernovas, which can spur the creation of new stars, as well as black holes and even solar systems. If you want to understand the patterns that shaped galaxies (and the rest of the universe), then you need to understand stars. The recent statement from the European Southern Observatory sums it up nicely: "Knowing the