Supernovae can produce resilient planet-forming material

A new study has revealed that supernovae can produce resilient material that can form Earth-like planets.

The research team, headed by Lau, used SOFIA's airborne telescope and the Faint Object InfraRed Camera for the SOFIA Telescope, FORCAST, to take detailed infrared images of an interstellar dust cloud known as Supernova Remnant Sagittarius A East, or SNR Sgr A East.

The team used SOFIA data to estimate the total mass of dust in the cloud from the intensity of its emission. The investigation required measurements at long infrared wavelengths in order to peer through intervening interstellar clouds and detect the radiation emitted by the supernova dust.

Astronomers already had evidence that a supernova's outward-moving shock wave can produce significant amounts of dust. Until now, a key question was whether the new soot- and sand-like dust particles would survive the subsequent inward "rebound" shock wave generated when the first, outward-moving shock wave collides with surrounding interstellar gas and dust.

These results also revealed the possibility that the vast amount of dust observed in distant young galaxies might have been made by supernova explosions of early massive stars, as no other known mechanism could have produced nearly as much dust.

The study is published in the Science magazine.