Ancient SUPERNOVA EXPLOSION contains enough dust for 7,000 EARTHS, say boffins Boffins believe that supernovae can produce enough dusty material to make thousands of Earths. An international team of scientists analysed the data from SOFIA – a NASA and German Aerospace Center's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy project – which had taken images of a dust cloud. "This discovery is a special …
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The discovery allowed the boffins to float the idea that huge quantities of dust spotted in distant young galaxies may have been produced by supernova explosions of early massive stars.The idea that roughly everything in the universe (other than hydrogen and some of the helium) was created by supernovae is a given in some geology books from the 1970s I'm reading, and is probably older than that (but I'm too lazy to look it up).
Is the real takeaway that we now know that the stuff doesn't rebound when it hits the outside world? Or that we didn't know how much dust was produced? Or that we didn't know it was already happening in young galaxies? Or something else?
That speculation is confirmed by evidence?
It's not like there were a bunch of competing theories1 for the origins of the heavier elements. But a basic aspect of scientific epistemology is not stopping at the point where you say, "yeah, that sounds likely".
More specifically, in this case, these observations provide evidence to address the question of "when heavy elements are produced by a supernova, are they just swept back in by the rebound wave?". Because if the answer to that was "yes", then we'd have a bit of a puzzle.
At any rate, that's my understanding of this particular bit of research.
1Explanations relying on the supernatural, yes; theories, not so much.
The initial event produced two energies equal in strength and opposite in nature...bits of compressed space surrounded by stretched space, happening in tandem, the latter pulling between any two of the former... attraction, aka: gravity, with its strength varying with the distance between them. Some compressed bits combine into units around which others orbit. When bits orbit in certain frequency ranges we, and our instruments, detect their presence from light energy. Many don't move in such a regular frequency range so we don't detect them in the same way but do detect them from their gravitational impact on things we do see...SAME STUFF, DIFFERENT MOTION.
It may be the speed of gravity waves we measure and light, warmth, growth, cellular change, etc. are what happens depending on what they encounter.
"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."
What is not clear, is if the dust etc does not survive the shock wave what would it become?
I can't imagine even a supernova shock wave being able to annihilate matter and if it did then there would be a corresponding release of extra radiation produced.
And here, my wife has been complaining about "where does all this dust come from?". Now that we know, I'm sure she'll start asking why NASA, etc. can't send a giant Hoover out there to clean it up and keep off the furniture. I'm getting my coat because the next step is to vacuum the garage, in her mind.
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