Take a hike. No, really. Go out for a hike somewhere and closely examine the rocks and soil you encounter. If you live near mountains, look at them and imagine them as they were when they were young. Then, think about where all this stuff came from. If you go back to almost first principles, you find out that what you’re seeing and hiking on is the leftovers of star formation. That’s because sometimes planets are what’s left after a star forms. And, in the case of our four inner planets, the leftovers became worlds we know and love.
The elements in those rocks, the ones that make up the plants and animals you see on yourhike, and you yourself, are all part of stuff that was a star–ashes that were recycled into the Sun and somehow made it into the soup of stuff that created Earth. Quite a cool thing to think about when you’re out hiking.
The big news about Alicia Soderberg and Edo Berger’s observations of a supernova just beginning its explosion is one of those great stories that illustrates the saying “Chance favors the prepared mind.” A few months ago when both authors were writing an article about their find for GeminiFocus (a magazine on which I’m associate editor), I marveled at how lucky these two were. But, they were doing more than just being in the right place at the right time. They also had the capability to reach out and grab use of several observatories to get the best multi-wavelength view of the supernova (which blew up in the galaxy NGC 2770 (which lies some 88 million light-years away from us). Of course, SWIFT saw the first x-ray emissions from the supernova, and the astronomers noticed that right away. In short order, the pair alerted the astronomy community, and soon the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico, the Gemini North and Keck 1 telescopes in Hawai’i, two telescopes at Palomar Observatory in California, and a telescope at Apache Point in New Mexico were all looking at this outburst.
The combination of observations from all this observatory “firepower” pins down the moments when the first x-rays began streaming from the star. Eventually this information will help astronomers understand the moment-by-moment events that occur when a massive star finally explodes as a supernova. It’s a look at stellar death throes that wouldn’t have been possible even a few years ago. Chance — and a lot of really good telescopes — really do favor the prepared astronomers who got this chance to look into the jaws of star death.
