Posted: 27 Dec 2017 08:04 AM PST
Despite the many impressive discoveries humans have made about the
universe, scientists are still unsure about the birth story of our solar
system. But now scientists have laid out a comprehensive theory for how
our solar system could have formed in the
wind-blown bubbles around a giant, long-dead star, addressing a nagging
cosmic mystery about the abundance of two elements in our solar system
compared to the rest of the galaxy.
The general prevailing theory is that our solar system formed billions
of years ago near a supernova. But the new scenario instead begins with a
giant type of star called a Wolf-Rayet star, which is more than 40 to
50 times the size of our own sun. They burn
the hottest of all stars, producing tons of elements which are flung
off the surface in an intense stellar wind. As the Wolf-Rayet star sheds
its mass, the stellar wind plows through the material that was around
it, forming a bubble structure with a dense
shell.
The Hubble image above shows of an enormous bubble being blown into
space by a super-hot, massive star. The Hubble image of the Bubble
Nebula, or NGC 7635, was chosen to mark the 26th anniversary of the
launch of Hubble into Earth orbit by the STS-31 space
shuttle crew on April 24, 1990.
"As Hubble makes its 26th revolution around our home star, the sun,
we celebrate the event with a spectacular image of a dynamic and
exciting interaction of a young star with its environment. The view of
the Bubble Nebula, crafted from Wide Field Camera
3 images, reminds us that Hubble gives us a front-row seat to the
awe-inspiring universe we live in," said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and
associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA
Headquarters, in Washington, D.C.
The Bubble Nebula is 7 light-years across – about one-and-a-half
times the distance from our sun to its nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha
Centauri – and resides 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation
Cassiopeia. The seething star forming this nebula
is 45 times more massive than our sun. Gas on the star gets so hot that
it escapes away into space as a "stellar wind" moving at over 4 million
miles per hour.
"The shell of such a bubble is a good place to produce stars,"
because dust and gas become trapped inside where they can condense into
stars, said coauthor Nicolas Dauphas, professor in the Department of
Geophysical Sciences. The authors estimate that 1
percent to 16 percent of all sun-like stars could be formed in such
stellar nurseries.
As for the fate of the giant Wolf-Rayet star that sheltered us: Its
life ended long ago, likely in a supernova explosion or a direct
collapse to a black hole. A direct collapse to a black hole would
produce little iron-60; if it was a supernova, the iron-60
created in the explosion may not have penetrated the bubble walls, or
was distributed unequally.
This setup differs from the supernova hypothesis in order to make
sense of two isotopes that occur in strange proportions in the early
solar system, compared to the rest of the galaxy. Meteorites left over
from the early solar system tell us there was a
lot of aluminium-26. In addition, studies, including a 2015 one by
Dauphas and a former student, increasingly suggest we had less of the
isotope iron-60.
This brings scientists up short, because supernovae produce both
isotopes. "It begs the question of why one was injected into the solar
system and the other was not," said coauthor Vikram Dwarkadas, a
research associate professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics.
This brought them to Wolf-Rayet stars, which release lots of
aluminium-26, but no iron-60. "The idea is that aluminum-26 flung from
the Wolf-Rayet star is carried outwards on grains of dust formed around
the star. These grains have enough momentum to punch
through one side of the shell, where they are mostly
destroyed--trapping the aluminum inside the shell," Dwarkadas said.
Eventually, part of the shell collapses inward due to gravity, forming
our solar system.
The Daily Galaxy via University of Chicago and Hubblesite,org
Mystery of Our Solar System's Origin --"May Have Formed in Bubbles Around a Giant, Long-Dead Star"
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