About 3,000 years ago, a star 15 times more massive than our sun exploded. Now, scientists are watching the explosion release valuable elements into space.
Astronomers have a powerful new observatory orbiting Earth, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)-led X-Ray Mapping and Spectroscopy Mission called XRISM. In collaboration with NASA, the team has just taken unprecedented images of this exploded star, now called “supernova remnant N132D,” located about 160,000 light years from Earth.
Giant stars create elements within their hot, pressurized cores, and can also create elements during violent stellar explosions that occur when they run out of fuel and collapse. In the image below, you can see the ruins of these stars enriching the cosmos with these elements. The XRISM Observatory found evidence of iron, calcium, sulfur, silicon and argon. (Iron, you may remember, is an important part of our blood.)
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“These elements form inside native stars and then explode when they go supernova,” said Brian Williams, NASA’s XRISM project scientist, in the agency’s statement.
Mashable Speed of Light
The remaining explosion of gas and elements that expand like bubbles has a diameter of about 75 light years (and one light year is about 6 trillion miles).
The small image on the right shows a close-up image of the supernova remnant N132D.
Credit: Thumbnail: JAXA/NASA/XRISM Xtend; Background: C. Smith/S. Points/MCELS Team/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
Artist’s conception of the XPRISM satellite in orbit.
Kredit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
XRISM carries instruments called spectrometers, which are invaluable for uncovering the composition of distant cosmic objects. The James Webb Space Telescope, for example, has a spectrometer. A spectrometer takes light and then separates it into different colors, similar to a prism, with different colors representing different elements. XRISM detects a type of light called X-rays, which are emitted by various objects in the universe – such as exploding stars and matter swirling around black holes – into space.
“XRISM will provide the international scientific community with a new view of the hidden X-ray sky,” Richard Kelley, the US principal investigator for XRISM at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the statement. “We will not only look at X-ray images of these sources, but also study their composition, movement and physical state.”
The ambitious space mission, launching in September 2023, is just getting started. It’s designed to last three years, but given its track record, it’s likely to last longer.
2024-01-06 17:40:45
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