Our Solar System Formed From The Cumulative Ashes Of Countless Stars, Not One Supernova

New study challenges the theory that an exploding star provided the impetus for our solar system.

By Rebecca Boyle Posted 12.18.2012 at 10:00 am 10 Comments

Infant Stars Baby stars glow reddish-pink in this infrared image of the Serpens star-forming region, captured by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Our sun may have looked like one of these baby stars when it formed 4.5 billion years ago. NASA/JPL-Caltech/L. Cieza (University of Texas at Austin

We are all star stuff, as Carl Sagan once so eloquently put it--we come from remnants, the leftover pieces of long-dead stars and the elements forged inside of them. But a new theory says we came together as the result of a slow agglomeration, not a titanic explosion. Our solar system was born like a snowdrift on a blustery day, particles slowly clustering together in ever-increasing groups until something notable forms.

This flies in the face of most solar system formation scholarship, which holds that shockwaves from a nearby supernova triggered the collapse of the dust cloud that eventually became our star and our planets. Computer models and 3-D simulations have confirmed that theory for at least the past couple of years. Now comes a new analysis of heavy elements by researchers at the University of Chicago.

Authors Haolan Tang and Nicolas Dauphas looked at concentrations of iron-60, a radioactive isotope of the metal that forms in an exploding star. Previous research has found high levels of this material in meteorites, early solar system leftovers that serve sort of like time capsules. An abundance of iron-60 is strong evidence for a supernova in the nearby cosmic neighborhood.

But Tang and Dauphas say it is well-mixed and in low abundance in our solar system, which casts doubt on that assumption. Tang and Dauphas examined the same meteorites, but used a different method--dissolving the meteorites to examine their contents--which reportedly reduced their error rates. To double-check it, they also looked for iron-58, an isotope that supernovas also produce. That isotope is also sparsely distributed, which confirmed the scarcity of iron-60 because the isotopes are so closely related.

If they’re right, and there’s not an abundance of iron-60, then there’s no need to say a supernova shockwave collapsed our nascent solar system’s dust cloud. So what did provide the push? Perhaps a massive star shed its gassy outer layers, spewing the material that would eventually become our solar system, according to these researchers. These materials coalesced and formed our sun, with some remaining mass eventually becoming the planets.

It remains to be seen how other planetary geologists will feel about this new wrinkle. But iron abundances will have to be taken into account when scientists try to describe how we got here, Tang said. The paper appears in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

[University of Chicago]

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10 Comments

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Robot

12/18/12 at 11:32 am

The truth may lay in the Ancient Scripts Sumerian as the GODS taught the humans they created...

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Robot

12/18/12 at 11:47 am

Neanderthals dominated the Earth landscape for 250,000 years and live in groups of 5 to 10. They made weapons and tools and yes had vocal cords. The style of how they lived remained mostly unchanged for their existence on Earth.

Then unlike evolutions style the modern human shows up, communicating better, making tools better, dominates the landscape and eliminates the Neanderthal. Yes some tiny interbreeding did happen between Neanderthals and modern human; this is in our genes.

There is still no scientific explanation for the sudden existance of humans. It was as if, POOF, we were created from a more intelligent source from above\GODS.

Which bring me back to what was taught to the Sumerians? Their writing history came from beings from above and their stories have no prior history, so are not passed down myths.

If you want to understand the making of the solar system, Earth and Gods, look so the Sumerian text; its all there.

By the way, if you just accept for one second an outside source tweak the Neanderthal gene to make a human, they science continues to be correct and evolution past is correct too. It all fits together nicely.

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Torbjörn Larsson_OM

12/18/12 at 3:07 pm

Perhaps. It is actually easier to predict the 60Fe and 26Al results from a sequential process in the nascent molecular cloud, where the 60Fe is produced by rapid, ~ 10 Ma, 1st gen supernovas and the 26Al is produced by slower, ~ 100 Ma, 2nd gen massive stars akin to proposed here. [ http is www.aanda.org/index.php?option=com_article&access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361/201219031&Itemid=129 ]

But I guess this works too, if these new results will win out.

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Torbjörn Larsson_OM

12/18/12 at 3:17 pm

@Robot: You are trolling, since your comment on biology has nothing to do with the article on astronomy.

You are also lying, likely willfully so, because human ancestry has a well known explanation, evolution. It is no different than other organisms. We even know the ancestral species (H. heidelbergensis.)

It isn't easy to correct a fractally wrong comment, but here goes:

Neanderthals were coexisting with anatomically modern humans, as was Denisovans, look it up, and _all of them_ ended up in the genome that constitutes humans today. We were all human apes before and after, the distinguishing characteristics to non-human apes diverging way before. Yes, you can look that up too.

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Torbjörn Larsson_OM

12/18/12 at 3:18 pm

The 2nd gen massive star 26Al seeder is important because of what the linked paper describes. Such a spherical shell it blows up, creating ~ 600 stars together with the Sun, predicts the outer characteristics of the solar system: the Kuiper belt outer dimensions, some of its specific objects, and the Oort cloud size.

These are exactly the missing characteristics that the Nice model with the 5th giant modification _can't_ predict! (The inner terrestrials, as well as their ice line & carbon line, are of course best predicted by specific disk aggregation models.)

So any which way, we now have good handles on how the whole system arose. That is clearly some awesome astronomical archaeology!

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zerox012

12/18/12 at 3:49 pm

Like Phoenix.

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Robot

12/18/12 at 5:00 pm

Torbjörn Larsson_OM,
Until you read the Sumerian history, you cannot even begin to say I am lying, but just pulling that one out of you buttocks, sir.

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Robot

12/18/12 at 5:22 pm

D13,
Yes I do get excited, lol, that current science suggests possibilities there is intelligent life in the cosmos and just didn't exist currently as the idea popped into their heads now in science, but existed long before, too.

Just considering the vast distances in space and if one old intelligence in the cosmic void had the ability to travels about the cosmos, they could easily live to be very old and have visited us often in the extreme past, recent past and current times.

And as modern humans tweak with DNA now, it would have been Childs play for a super cosmic traveling intellect.

Life around us in the ever so small and the great cosmos is just WoWzers and just Amazing!!

Torbjörn Larsson_OM, the Sumerians invented writing and do you think in this first invention of the hard work of putting their thoughts on stone, they just recorded fantasy made up stories or would it be more likely from such a highly intelligence culture, they recorded what was most important to them, the realities to be recorded in stone for future generations to know..

Traditionally when a person decided to tell another person a fictional story, they tell them in advance this is fictional story and when it is history, they say hey this is history and true. The Sumerians wrote down their history as true and they have a real account of the making of our solar system as they were told from being that came from above.

I just wish our current scientist would read the Sumerian account of our history and then feed it into their super computers and see how that pans out. That would be an interesting read.

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