Using NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy
(SOFIA), an international scientific team discovered that supernovae are
capable of producing a substantial amount of the material from which
planets like Earth can form.
These findings are published in the March 19 online issue of Science magazine.
"Our observations reveal a particular cloud produced by a supernova
explosion 10,000 years ago contains enough dust to make 7,000 Earths,"
said Ryan Lau of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
The research team, headed by Lau, used SOFIA's airborne telescope and
the Faint Object InfraRed Camera for the SOFIA Telescope, FORCAST, to
take detailed infrared images of an interstellar dust cloud known as
Supernova Remnant Sagittarius A East, or SNR Sgr A East.
The team used SOFIA data to estimate the total mass of dust in the
cloud from the intensity of its emission. The investigation required
measurements at long infrared wavelengths in order to peer through
intervening interstellar clouds and detect the radiation emitted by the
supernova dust.
Astronomers already had evidence that a supernova’s outward-moving
shock wave can produce significant amounts of dust. Until now, a key
question was whether the new soot- and sand-like dust particles would
survive the subsequent inward “rebound” shock wave generated when the
first, outward-moving shock wave collides with surrounding interstellar
gas and dust.
"The dust survived the later onslaught of shock waves from the
supernova explosion, and is now flowing into the interstellar medium
where it can become part of the 'seed material' for new stars and
planets," Lau explained.
These results also reveal the possibility that the vast amount of
dust observed in distant young galaxies may have been made by supernova
explosions of early massive stars, as no other known mechanism could
have produced nearly as much dust.
"This discovery is a special feather in the cap for SOFIA,
demonstrating how observations made within our own Milky Way galaxy can
bear directly on our understanding of the evolution of galaxies billions
of light years away," said Pamela Marcum, a SOFIA project scientist at
Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
SOFIA is a heavily modified Boeing 747 Special Performance jetliner
that carries a telescope with an effective diameter of 100 inches (2.5
meters) at altitudes of 39,000 to 45,000 feet (12 to 14 km). SOFIA is a
joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center. The aircraft
observatory is based at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center facility
in Palmdale, California. The agency’s Ames Research Center in Moffett
Field, California, is home to the SOFIA Science Center, which is managed
by NASA in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association
in Columbia, Maryland, and the German SOFIA Institute at the University
of Stuttgart.