At the most fundamental level, humans are collections of elements. Organized elegantly and acting out the laws of physics and chemistry at the macro scale. Every emotion, every thought, every action, can be broken down to simple chemical reactions. While the minutia of these reactions is often a mystery, the origin of the elements themselves is well understood. Almost every element that makes up the human body is traceable to cores of massive stars whose life ended in a violent supernova – spreading these elements across the galaxy.

PSR B0329+54 and PSR B1822-09 represent radio transmissions captured from rapidly spinning supernova remnants (pulsars), separated by rotational period, and converted into 3D renderings. Each horizontal stripe represents a single rotation of the pulsar; each image represents one minute worth of rotations. These particular pulsars rotate or ‘pulse’ at 84 and 78 times per minute, respectively, within the same range of the average human heart rate – reiterating our connection to these dying stars.