An international team of scientists on Friday said that they had detected silica — the main component of glass — in the remnants of two supernovae that are billions of light-years from Earth.
Researchers used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to analyze light emitted by the collapsing megacluster and obtain silica’s “fingerprint” based on the wavelength spectrum of light the material is known to emit.
A supernova occurs when a large star burns through its own fuel, causing a catastrophic collapse that ends in an explosion of galactic proportions. It is in these celestial maelstroms that individual atoms fuse together to form many common elements, including sulfur and calcium.
Silica makes up about 60 percent of the Earth’s crust and one particular form, quartz, is a major ingredient of sand. As well as glass windows and fiberglass, silica is also an important part of the recipe for industrial concrete.
“We’ve shown for the first time that the silica produced by the supernovae was significant enough to contribute to the dust throughout the universe, including the dust that ultimately came together to form our home planet,” said Haley Gomez, from Cardiff University’s School of Physics and Astronomy.
“Every time we gaze through a window, walk down the pavement or set foot on a sandy beach, we are interacting with material made by exploding stars that burned millions of years ago,” Gomez said.
The study was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In 2016, scientists reported they had found traces of lithium — a metal used in the manufacture of many modern-day electronics — at the heart of exploding nova, a phenomenon that occurs when a white-dwarf star absorbs hydrogen from a nearby sun.
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