A space rock could be the window to the first evidence of a Supernova explosion on Earth. Know what scientists have found.
While science has come a long way, our knowledge of space beyond our planet is very limited. Scientists have always wanted to study and understand the vastness of the night sky, but the lack of resources has been a serious limitation. Among them was the puzzle of a supernova. A supernova is a massive explosion of a dying star. Astronomers have theorized about supernova activity, but we don’t really know what causes it and what happens during or immediately after a supernova explosion. Well, this was true until very recently as a new study may have found the first evidence of a supernova explosion on Earth. Well, the proof can be found right here on our planet. According to a team of researchers, the truth is hidden behind a stone called Hypatia. Also read: The earth has so much gold and no one can understand why
The Hypatia Stone, named after the fourth-century female mathematician and philosopher, is a mysterious stone discovered in Egypt in 1996. The stone is about the size of a 1.3-inch-wide pebble. This inch has puzzled scientists for decades. Why? Because its geological signature does not match any similar structures found in our planet or any known meteorites or asteroids. This began a quest for Jan Kramers and Georgy Belyanin, two researchers at the University of Johannesburg who spent a decade studying Hypatia and uncovering its secrets. And finally, they published a study in the journal Icarus, concluding that Hypatia could be the product of a supernova and that tangible evidence of the explosion had never been studied before.
Hypatia may be the first evidence of a supernova explosion on Earth
Hypatia has a unique structure that makes it unlike any other geological formation on the planet or around the solar system. Hypatia has microscopic diamonds in different layers of its body. Furthermore, it is also thought that the stone may predate the formation of the solar system itself. For researchers Kramers and Belyanin, the first task was to peel off the different layers of the rock to see what problems they were solving. Also read: James Webb Space Telescope in home test; The early NASA photos are amazing
“We’ve identified 15 different elements in Hypatia with much greater precision and accuracy with the proton micrometer. This gives us the chemical ‘composition’ that we need, so that’s why we’ve been working on it. Jan can start the process of analyzing all the data that follows”, Belyanin speak Weather.com. “We have found a consistent pattern of trace element abundance that is radically different from anything in the solar system, primitive or evolved. Objects in the asteroid belt and meteorites also do not match this. So next, we looked beyond the solar system,” he added.
Studying its composition and eliminating celestial suspects, the researchers came to the general conclusion of a very rare Type Ia Supernova explosion. Type Ia is a type of supernova explosion that occurs in a binary system in which one of the stars is a white dwarf. So, in a way, the first tangible evidence of a supernova explosion on Earth is within scientists’ grasp.
“In a sense, we ‘caught ‘a supernova Ia’,” says Kramers, because the gas atoms from the explosion were caught up in the surrounding dust cloud, eventually forming Hypatia’s mother body,” Kramers said.
