Our solar system formed from a dust cloud thrown off by an exploding star more than 4.5 billion years ago. Is the remnant of that star still around? Would it be possible to figure out which one it is? Did it explode near to where our solar system is now? Do we know how much time passed between the death of that star and the formation of our solar system?
Thanks,
Rob
Most of the cloud that formed the Solar System was primordial hydrogen. Some of it was from the remains of dead stars, but not on a one-for-one basis: Material from multiple early-generation stars went into us, and material from any given star could end up in multiple present stellar systems.
By this I assume you mean hydrogen that had never been incorporated in a star before. How can we tell?
They’ve never filed in Delaware.
Well, given any particular hydrogen atom we can’t tell its history. But we can make models for stellar formation and death, and calculate percentages from those.
Would the remnants from those early stars be in our neighborhood?
The famous Pillars of Creation photo shows some structures in the Eagle nebula where we see stars forming. In this case, is nearly all the matter in the nebula from the remnant star?
Thanks,
Rob
Applause.
Note that those models are largely statistical in nature, and are extrapolated from not only our observations of stellar formation of the current population of stars from the metals-heavy substratum (confusingly referred to as “Population I” stars) but theoretical models of stellar evolution which start with some initial guestimates about the pertubations which caused the first stars (heavy, metals-free “Population III” stars) which determines how massive and the quantity of heavier elements which were produced. Since we have no observations of Population III stars, we can only infer from metallicity of observable Population II stars as to how much primordial hydrogen was originally bound up into stars and how much remained in nonfusing cosmic structures or formless media. Regardless, as previously pointed out, the material for our star did not come from a distinct predecessor.
Stranger
The current working theory is that the Sun was formed in a nebula similar to the Orion Nebula. A supernova within the nebula triggered the local collapse of gas that led to the formation of the Sun. The evidence for a supernova “seeding” the baby Solar System is the existence of traces in meteorites of stable daughter nuclei of short-lived isotopes that can only form in exploding, short-lived stars. But the vast majority of the Solar System was formed out of boring Big Bang-created stuff.
I seem to remember a study looking for where the Sun’s “brothers and sisters” are today… but my Google-fu is weak.
Given that the sun has done 18 laps of the galaxy, and that what ever star(s) contributed to it were probably lightyears inward or outward in the galaxy, the distance between our system and our system’s progenitor(s) has not remained very constant. Chances are it/they are somewhere on the far side of the galaxy right now.
This one? I remember reading an issue of Sky & Telescope a few years ago that had an article about it.
Every element heavier than iron must have been formed in a stellar explosion, because the nuclear reactions to form them from lighter elements are endothermic.
Yeah, I think that’s the one, 2009 sounds about the time frame that I remember reading about it. The “lost siblings” tag line is really familiar now that I see it.
And even most of the elements lighter than iron, though not formed in supernovae, must have been dispersed in them. Being formed inside a live star doesn’t do you much good unless you can get out of the star.
UPDATE!
A stellar sibling of the Sun may have been found in the constellation Hercules.
Doesn’t any get out in stellar winds or coronal mass ejections? Even if the proportion of nuclei heavier than helium in a stellar wind is very low, since essentially all stars are blowing stellar winds all the time I should have have thought that this would be a substantial contribution to the interstellar medium compared to that of such rare events as supernovae.
And what about regular novae, which, surely, are commoner than supernovae? Don’t they blow off any nuclei heavier than helium into space? What about binary stars (or other close encounters of stars) where one star pulls material gravitationally off the other? I guess most of that material ends up in the bigger star, but surely some gets lost into space.
Are you seeking paternity?
Where did that number come from?
The back of the sun’s Range Rover has a sticker that says 1,730,000,000,000,000,000,000.2
That being said, you can get those stickers anywhere, ferpetesake.
Yes, some, but it’s an extremely small percentage of a star’s mass. Supernovae may be rare, but when they happen they expel a huge chunk of the star’s mass.