by Scientists have discovered a rare particle of stardust that came from the explosive death of a distant star’s supernova. It seems that this trout is locked inside an ancient dragon.
The dust grain, though tiny, can help tell the story of stellar life, death and rebirth spanning nearly 13.8 billion years of the cosmos’ history. It could also allow scientists to unlock the secrets of a recently discovered type of star that dies in a unique supernova explosion.
“These particles are like celestial time capsules, providing insight into the life of their parent star,” the head of the research team and a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute said in a statement.
Related: Scientists may finally know why this infamous supernova wears a ‘string of pearls’
A wonderful story of death and rebirth
Most meteorites are like time capsules that tell scientists what material was present in the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago, when the sun was just an infant star surrounded by a disk of gas and dust called a “protoplanetary disk .”
Overly dense patches of this gas and dust collapsed under their own gravity and would continue to accumulate material, leading to the formation of planets like Earth and the creation of the solar system as we know it today. The material left over from the birth of the planet would have been integrated into asteroids and comets.
The early solar system was a violent and chaotic place. Asteroids and Comets slam into Earth and other planets, and even smash into each other. Fragments created by this early Cosmic demolition derby would also rain down on our planet; this, in all likelihood, still occurs today – providing a cosmic “fossil record” of the early solar system.
However, there was always the possibility that material sealed in ancient meteorites could tell a much older story, one not of creation but of destruction.
When the stars that existed before the sun died in massive supernova explosions, the material that these stellar bodies had been creating throughout their lives would have been scattered throughout the universe.
Some of this material became the next generation of stars, and the protoplanetary disks around them. However, it is a challenge to distinguish such manipulative material from other types of cosmic material. Nevill and team tried to do that by looking for rare versions, or “isotopes,” of common chemical elements.
“Matter created in our solar system has predictable isotope ratios – a set of elements with different numbers of neutrons,” Nevill explained. “The particle we analyzed has a magnesium isotope ratio that is unlike anything in our solar system.”
The team was surprised by the extreme results of this analysis.
“The results were literally off the charts,” said Nevill. “The largest magnesium isotopic ratio from previous studies of pre-solar grains was about 1,200. The grain in our study has a value of 3,025, which is the highest ever found.”
He thinks that this extremely high isotopic ratio indicates that the star that launched this spiral grain into the region of space that once hosted the solar system died in a recently discovered event: a hydrogen-burning supernova.
Hydrogen-burning supernovae occur when massive stars explode with hydrogen left in their outer layer (after their hydrogen supplies have been exhausted in their cores). As a result, this remaining hydrogen is quickly burned.
“The atom probe has given us a whole level of detail that we haven’t been able to access in previous studies,” said Curtin University team member and scientist David Saxey. “A hydrogen-burning supernova is a type of star that was only recently discovered, around the same time we were analyzing the tiny dust particle.
“The use of the atom probe in this study provides a new level of detail that helps us understand how these stars formed.”
Related Stories:
— James Webb Space Telescope reveals stunning view of expanding supernova remnant (photos)
— SETI searches for alien signals synchronized with the 1987A supernova
— A nearby supernova could reveal the secret life of ghostly neutrinos. This is how.
Curtin University School of Earth and Planetary Sciences staff member and researcher Phil Bland said these findings show how rare particles in meteorites can give scientists insight into events occurring far beyond the boundaries of the solar system.
“Being able to link atomic-scale measurements in the laboratory to a recently discovered type of star is fantastic,” he said.
The team’s research was published on Wednesday (March 27) in the Astrophysical Journal.
