Nov29
‘Little Bang’ created our Solar System

SYDNEY: New evidence backs up the idea that a shockwave from the explosion of massive star triggered the collapse of a dense, dusty gas cloud to form our Sun and its retinue of planets.
For many decades astronomers have postulated that the after effects of this violent supernova led to the birth of the Solar System.
But detailed models of this formation process have only produced the right results under the simplifying – and likely wrong – assumption that the temperatures during the violent events remained constant.
Devil in the details
Now, U.S. astrophysicists at the Carnegie Institution, in Washington DC, have shown for the first time that a supernova could indeed have triggered the Solar System’s formation under the more likely conditions of rapid heating and cooling.
They argue that their results, published last month in the Astrophysical Journal, resolve a long-standing debate.
“We’ve had chemical evidence from meteorites that points to a supernova triggering our Solar System’s formation since the 1970s,” said Alan Boss, lead author of the study.
“But the devil has been in the details,” he said. “Until this study, scientists have not been able to work out a self-consistent scenario, where collapse is triggered at the same time that newly created isotopes from the supernova are injected into the collapsing cloud.”
Short-lived radioactive isotopes – versions of elements with the same number of protons, but a different number of neutrons – found in very old meteorites decay on time scales of millions of years and turn into different ‘daughter’ elements.
Source: Cosmos Online – click here or title for full article



