THE existence of you and everyone you know is inextricably tied up with the universe. For everything you see around you, every last one of us, is formed from the remnants of stardust.

Why, you ask? Well, that story begins about 4.6 billion years ago, with the sudden and cataclysmic collapse of a nebula.

The universe is fairly old. Scientists estimate that the Big Bang most likely took place about 14 billion years ago. But our solar system didn’t come into being for almost another 10 billion years after that.

Before us, there was the nebula: a swirling mass of gas and dust. It’s likely that the nebula collapsed in on itself, leaving all of its mass to come together and form a tiny star.

This was the birth of our solar system. The baby star grew into our sun, and the debris and dust left over from the nebula collapse became our planets.

Scientists know that this happened from observing the growth of other solar systems, but we still have work to do to determine exactly what processes occurred to take us from dust to planets.

The planets likely grew out of a violent series of impacts. Particles of dust left over from the nebula collapse were drawn into the orbit of the newly-formed sun.

Here, they repeatedly smashed into one another, each time fusing to become a larger object, until they eventually grew into asteroids, moons or planets.

But to be sure of what happened in those early millennia of the solar system, we need to see it first-hand.

We may not have been there 4.6 billion years ago to observe the physical forces that shaped our solar system, but thanks to cutting-edge technology, we can recreate them with atomic precision.

Using the advanced facilities in Oxfordshire, scientists are studying the microscale reactions that occur when particles of powder collide.

These particles of powder are chemically and structurally very similar to the intersolar dust that went on to form planets.

By exploring the atomic-level changes that take place in this material during impact, we could shed new light on the early moments of the cosmos.

With state-of-the-art technology, researchers are able to take micro-images of the moments before, during and after impact.

These images last just a billionth of a second, and when we pair them all together, we can create a ‘nanomovie’, which shows exactly how the structure of the powder is altered, nanosecond by nanosecond.

Visualising this impact has never been done before in this way. In the past we’ve had to rely on computer simulations.

But thanks to Oxfordshire’s pioneering science infrastructure, we can now support experiments like this that probe even deeper into the origins of the solar system.

Human beings are infinitesimally small in the context of time. We’ve been around in our present form for about 200,000 years. This means that if the history of the universe were an entire day, modern humanity would have been around for less than two seconds.

And yet we belong to a much bigger story of chaos and creation that starts with the almighty collapse of a vast cloud of dust, and ends with the birth of our planet.

It’s hard to picture everything we now know as arising out of the tiniest specks of dust. But although it happened long before we were there to witness it, those events shaped where we are today. Ultimately the old adage rings true: we are all born out of stardust.