“Everything around us comes from dying stars,” Ashal said in a statement to the media. “We are made of stardust. To be able to study this fact – what we are made of – in such detail and understand where the elements that surround us come from, is just fantastic. “
Stars produce heavy elements through the process of stellar nuclear synthesis. When a star burns, dies and explodes, a thermonuclear reaction occurs within it.
A supernova is one of the places with the highest temperature and density in the universe. Materials in stars burn and form heavier and heavier elements, from hydrogen to helium, from helium to carbon, from carbon to oxygen, etc., along the periodic table to iron.
When the stars finally explode, they blast all of this material in the universe at up to 30% the speed of light to form the next generation of stars and planets. “This is how the planet and everything around us can contain all these heavy elements,” Ashal said. “They have been transformed into dying stars.”
It’s widely accepted that most of the heavy elements in the universe are made up of stellar nucleosynthesis, but Ashal wanted to know more: track down specific elements of the supernova types out there and measure how quickly these elements are formed by stars.
I am looking for manganese, chromium, cobalt, nickel
In their first project, scientists will search for common elements on Earth, such as manganese, chromium, cobalt and nickel, focusing the James Webb telescope on one supernova in particular: a third-generation white dwarf named SN2021aefx, which has exploded. A year ago in the spiral galaxy NGC1566, also known as the Spanish dancer.
Ashall will use the telescope to collect images and spectroscopic data for the element in SN2021aefx. Spectroscopy involves looking at the spectrum a substance produces when it interacts or emits light by breaking light into its component colors, according to NASA.
“The spectrograph tells us about the lines of different elements,” the researchers said. “If there is a line, we know the element is there.”
The second Ashal project will focus on the discovery of carbon monoxide and silicon monoxide, as well as the building blocks of life in the universe, in the collapse of supernovae.
A collapsing primary supernova is a massive dying star with a mass greater than eight times the mass of our Sun. When these stars die, they collapse in on themselves and create explosions 100 billion times brighter than the Sun.
Using observations made by the James Webb Space Telescope, Ashal will work not only to determine the source of the heavy elements, but also to investigate when they were ejected by the supernova explosion.
“When we measure these lines, we can tell the speed of the explosion,” Ashal said. “Then we will understand how quickly these elements were launched into the universe.”
Starting with Type Ia supernovae, Ashall hopes to build a sample of different types of supernovae to produce meaningful statistics on their role as elementalists.
“If we don’t find that these elements come from supernovae, we’ll have to reassess what we know about how stars die and how these elements were released into the universe,” the scientist said.
