Massive Star Explosion Seeded the Early Solar System, Meteorite Study

A supernova could have shot matter into the early solar system, a new study shows. 

Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/CXC/SAO

The explosive death of a star seeded matter into the solar system soon after its birth, analysis of a meteorite now reveals.

Earth and the rest of the solar system coalesced from a giant cloud of gas and dust more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Many of the details about the galactic neighborhood in which the solar system arose still remain a mystery.

Meteorites contain some of the oldest material in the solar system, dating back to its formation. As such, researchers often analyze these objects in order to discover what materials were present when the sun, Earth and other planets were born.

This study sheds light on where these solar system bodies might have come from.

All elements heavier than nickel are ultimately created by supernovas, giant explosions resulting from the deaths of stars.

These explosions are bright enough to momentarily outshine their entire galaxies. Now, scientists analyzing meteorites have found that a supernova may have injected matter into the solar system within a small window of time after the solar system's first solids formed.

Gregory Brennecka

"This is evidence for supernova addition at the very start of our solar system, over 4.5 billion years ago," said the meteorite study's lead author, Gregory Brennecka, a cosmochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Brennecka and his colleagues investigated the Allende meteorite, which fell to Earth as a fireball in Mexico in 1969.

They focused on lumps within this meteorite known as calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions.

These particles are some of the oldest objects in the solar system — they were the first solids to form in the protoplanetary disk that eventually gave rise to Earth and the other planets.

The scientists focused on a wide range of isotopes within the inclusions. In general, elements come in a variety of isotopes that differ in how many neutrons they possess in their atomic nuclei; carbon-12 has six neutrons, while carbon-13 has seven. (Both have six protons.)