NASA Just Spotted An Exploded Star Blasting Vital Elements Into Space
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Around 3,000 years ago, a star 15 times bigger than our sun exploded. Now, scientists are watching it blast valuable elements into space.
Astronomers have a powerful new observatory orbiting Earth, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency-led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission). In collaboration with NASA, the team just captured an unprecedented view of this exploded star, now called "supernova remnant N132D," located some 160,000 light-years away.
Massive stars forge elements deep inside their hot, pressurized cores, and can also create elements during a violent stellar blast that occurs when they run out of fuel and collapse. In the image below, you're seeing the wreckage of such a star enrich the cosmos with these elements. The XRISM observatory picked up evidence of iron, calcium, sulfur, silicon, and argon. (Iron, you may recall, is a vital part of our blood.)
"These elements were forged in the original star and then blasted away when it exploded as a supernova," Brian Williams, NASA's XRISM project scientist, said in an agency statement.
[...] "XRISM will provide the international science community with a new glimpse of the hidden X-ray sky," Richard Kelley, the U.S. principal investigator for XRISM at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "We'll not only see X-ray images of these sources, but also study their compositions, motions, and physical states."
The ambitious space mission, launched in September 2023, is just beginning. It's designed to last three years, but given the track record, it'll likely last for a lot longer.
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