Here are two excerpts from a book I recently read, "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry," by Neil deGrasse Tyson:
In our own solar system, for example, everything that is not the Sun
adds up to less than one fifth of one percent of the Sun’s mass.
Every
second of every day, 4.5 billion tons of fast-moving hydrogen nuclei
are turned into energy as they slam together to make helium within the
fifteen-million-degree core of the Sun.
Helium
is widely recognized as an over-the-counter, low-density gas that, when
inhaled, temporarily increases the vibrational frequency of your
windpipe and larynx, making you sound like Mickey Mouse. Helium is the
second simplest and second most abundant element in the universe.
Although a distant second to hydrogen in abundance, there’s fifty times
more of it than all other elements in the universe combined. One of the
pillars of big bang cosmology is the prediction that in every region of
the cosmos, no less than about ten percent of all atoms are helium,
manufactured in that percentage across the well-mixed primeval fireball
that was the birth of our universe.
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