star dust

You, me, everyone who has ever lived and ever will live, your house, you car, your son, your daughter, even your dog are all made of star dust. So is this beautiful planet we call Earth. So are all the planets in the solar system and the sun itself.
Imagine the scene. some 6 thousand million years ago. A vast cloud of gas & dust is hit by the shockwave of a supernova (star death) and collapses under its own gravity, nuclear fusion is ignited and a star, in this case, our sun is born. Any material from the cloud that did not become our star, forms a disc around her and out of this disc the planets are born and we have our solar system.
So our entire solar system and everything in it was born out of a cloud of gas & dust. The trigger to the birth of our entire solar system was one of the most energetic things imaginable, a supernova.
Stars are factories. The very first stars were giant and made of the lightest element, hydrogen. These stars fused new elements inside their cores all through their life times, these new elements were subsequently blown into space when the star died in a supernova, helping to create the next generation of stars. Each generation of stars fused heavier and heavier (more & more complex) atoms together, until we finally reached things like oxygen & carbon.
All the complex elements in the universe, including the carbon we are made of, was made in the core and in the death throws of countless stars.