Posted on 12/22/2018 10:29:52 AM PST by ETL
Everything around you – your desk, your laptop, your coffee cup – in fact, even you – is made of stardust, the stuff forged in the fiery furnaces of stars that died before our sun was born.
Probing the space surrounding a mysterious stellar corpse, scientists at the University of Arizona have made a discovery that could help solve a long-standing mystery: Where does stardust come from?
When stars die, they seed the cosmos around them with the elements that go on to coalesce into new stars, planets, asteroids and comets. Most everything that makes up Earth, even life itself, consists of elements made by previous stars, including silicon, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. But this is not the whole story.
Meteorites commonly contain traces of a type of stardust that, until now, was believed to form only in exceptionally violent, explosive events of stellar death known as novae or supernovae – too rare to account for the abundance preserved in meteorites.
Researchers at the UA used radio telescopes in Arizona and Spain to observe gas clouds in the young planetary nebula K4-47, an enigmatic object approximately 15,000 light-years from Earth.
Classified as a nebula, K4-47 is a stellar remnant, which astronomers believe was created when a star not unlike our sun shed some of its material in a shell of outflowing gas before ending its life as a white dwarf.
To their surprise, the researchers found that some of the elements that make up the nebula – carbon, nitrogen and oxygen – are highly enriched with certain variants that match the abundances seen in some meteorite particles but are otherwise rare in our solar system: so-called heavy isotopes of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, or 13C, 15N and 17O, respectively. These isotopes differ from their more common forms by containing an extra neutron inside their nucleus.
Fusing an additional neutron onto an atomic nucleus requires extreme temperatures in excess of 200 million degrees Fahrenheit, leading scientists to conclude those isotopes could only be formed in novae – violent outbursts of energy in aging binary star systems – and supernovae, in which a star blows itself apart in one cataclysmic explosion.
"The models invoking only novae and supernovae could never account for the amounts of 15N and 17O we observe in meteorite samples," said Lucy Ziurys, senior author of the paper, which is published in the Dec. 20 issue of the journal Nature.
"The fact that we're finding these isotopes in K4-47 tells us that we don't need strange exotic stars to explain their origin. It turns out your average garden variety stars are capable of producing them as well."
“From dust to dust”
It seems we already knew about this.
WOW!! I bet there are a lot of Desks, Lap tops and coffee cups in that galaxy!!
I bet there are whole systems of planet sized clumps of matter maybe even forming their own little solar systems (without a star) that exist. And we will never be able to see them.
FTL travel would be dangerous without the gravity drive mentioned by Bob Lazar. You essentially grab space next to the star you want to go to, and then step into it.
You would have to see the star you’re going to- because you would never know what you’re going to hit if you just travel through ‘empty’ space.
thank you...
Funny how scientists think they’ve come up with an amazing find and it’s been in the Bible all of the time.
Hoagy Carmichael
Sometimes I wonder
Why I spend the lonely nights
Dreaming of a song
The melody
Haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
Oh, but that was long ago
Now my consolation is in the stardust of a song
Beside a garden wall, when stars are bright
You are in my arms
The nightingale
Tells his fairytale
Of paradise, where roses grew
Though I dream in vain
In my heart, it will remain
My stardust melody
The memory of love's refrain
Though I dream in vain
In my heart, it will remain
My stardust melody
The memory of love's refrain
Beautiful.
So, we’re all star children.
Now here is a stellar corpse, with no lost stardust.
*ping*
Thanks fieldmarshaldj.
Yep - the answer to the deepest questions if, “Because, He who spoke us into existence said so...”
They can call it what they want but most of it seems to have settled in my house......
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