A dying star sounds terribly morbid, doesn’t it? A light winked out. Yet we paint our barns red because of the physics of star death!
Do you know how we get the color red? Yonatan Zuger from Google explained it to Smithsonian in a recent article:
Red ochre—Fe2O3—is a simple compound of iron and oxygen that absorbs yellow, green and blue light and appears red. It’s what makes red paint red. It’s really cheap because it’s really plentiful. And it’s really plentiful because of nuclear fusion in dying stars.”
As soon as a dying star hits 56 nucleon, it falls apart, which gives us our source of iron among many other things. But iron is important because it’s actually what makes red paint. Every barn is painted with the failure of a star!