Slashdot Mirror
Supernova Shrapnel Found In Meteorite
coondoggie writes "Talk about finding a needle in a cosmic haystack. Scientists this week said they found microscopic shrapnel in a meteorite of a star they say exploded around the birth of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago."
Remarkable!
Think of the odds: this meteorite landed 146 years ago in 1864.
What are the chances that something would be flying around the solar system for nearly 4.5 billion years then hit this wee planet which was Created only 5854 years earlier?
Most amazing indeed.
Trolling is a art,
Were they able to recover any files from Suprnova?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
This is why you should never shoot blindly into the sky. Sure you think it's harmless, but your great-great-great-great(etc)-grandparents won't think it's so funny when they get attacked out of the blue by an alien race from another star system seeking revenge for your errant shot that just happened to kill their beloved leader. Your celebratory gunfire after your local sports team wins some meaningless (from a pan-galactic perspective) competition could end up sparking an interstellar war.
Davy Crocket didn't have > 2 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 tons of bullets either.
isn't any atom heavier than Fe technically supernova shrapnel?
Not if you consider "shrapnel" to mean "fragments that are small but not gaseous". The point here is that a nanoscale grain of chromium54 has been found, which suggests it cooled out of the supernova gas cloud and was driven into the meteroite during a collision, so it is a more-or-less pristine piece of supernova condensate that has not been processed further, the way the iron on Earth has, for example.
That's a fairly interesting find, I'd say.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Great. Now Pluto ranks below shrapnel.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Almost right. You can only really make those heavier elements through processes which occur during a supernova, yes. But although lighter elements (say, carbon) can be made during normal stellar lifetimes...how are you going to get it out?
I found a supernova remnant this morning. It was my foot.
The article is a little less than clear about the actual research that occurred, as usual. From the sound of it, I suspect that what they found was discrete ejecta - a blob of material which recognizably came from a specific supernova which had not mixed with other material. This is cool since it gives us a sample which we can study in that specific context.
isn't any atom heavier than Fe technically supernova shrapnel?
Iron is kind of a ground-state on the periodic table. Below that, more energy is required to keep an atom together (hence, why fusion works to release energy), above that it takes less energy to have the atom be smaller (hence, why fission *also* releases energy). Iron is the direction everything trends towards. When every last drop of energy has been squeezed out of the universe, the final super-massive black hole of everything will be made up of a giant ball of iron.