| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
As It Turns Out, We Really Are All Starstuff
Hubble image of the Crab Nebula supernova remnant captured with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars,” Carl Sagan famously said in his 1980 series Cosmos. “We are made of starstuff.”
And even today, observations with NASA’s airborne SOFIA observatory are supporting this statement. Measurements taken of the dusty leftovers from an ancient supernova located near the center our galaxy – aka SNR Sagittarius A East – show enough “starstuff” to build our entire planet many thousands of times over.
“Our observations reveal a particular cloud produced by a supernova explosion 10,000 years ago contains enough dust to make 7,000 Earths,” said research leader Ryan Lau of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York – the same school, by the way, where Carl Sagan taught astronomy and space science.
(…)
Read the rest of As It Turns Out, We Really Are All Starstuff (232 words)
© Jason Major for Universe Today, 2015. |
Permalink |
No comment |
Post tags: Cornell, dust, NASA, Sagan, Sagittarius, SOFIA, starstuff, supernova
Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh
Source: http://www.universetoday.com/119541/as-it-turns-out-we-really-are-all-starstuff/
