9 replies to this topic

[Nicole Sharp]

I read on Wikipedia that the Pleiades Open Star Cluster might be the location of the supernova whose debris eventually formed the Solar System (and human beings).  Couldn't find much on Google Search to verify this theory though.  Any thoughts on this?

 

https://en.wikipedia...ki/Local_Bubble

Edited by Nicole Sharp, 23 August 2019 - 06:50 PM.

[Nicole Sharp]

Oh.  It looks like I read the article wrong.  The Pleiades only formed about 115 million years ago.  And Sol only entered the Local Bubble about 10 million years ago, so it's not related to the formation of the Solar System.

 

Are there any candidates for the location of the supernova that the Solar System formed from?  Or is that just too long ago to know?

Edited by Nicole Sharp, 23 August 2019 - 07:03 PM.

[jrbarnett]

I read on Wikipedia that the Pleiades Open Star Cluster might be the location of the supernova whose debris eventually formed the Solar System (and human beings).  Couldn't find much on Google Search to verify this theory though.  Any thoughts on this?

 

https://en.wikipedia...ki/Local_Bubble

That's pretty fascinating.  Especially considering that 10-20 million years ago you had mammalian species here on Earth.  The big dinos were long gone.  But it seems a little implausible that such a recent cataclysmic even located so near Sol in interstellar distance terms, and capable of creating such a huge, matter and gas deficient bubble in local space, would not also have bombarded Earth with massive gamma ray radiation and killed all forms of life.  Figure the Pleiades is about 440 LY from Sol.  Geninga, the other popular candidate for the event is about twice that distance.  Still pretty close in galactic terms, but I sure would like to see some analysis as to what kinds of radiation levels such a nearby supernova would have caused here on Terra.

 

Best,

 

Jim 

[Nicole Sharp]

That's pretty fascinating.  Especially considering that 10-20 million years ago you had mammalian species here on Earth.  The big dinos were long gone.  But it seems a little implausible that such a recent cataclysmic even located so near Sol in interstellar distance terms, and capable of creating such a huge, matter and gas deficient bubble in local space, would not also have bombarded Earth with massive gamma ray radiation and killed all forms of life.  Figure the Pleiades is about 440 LY from Sol.  Geninga, the other popular candidate for the event is about twice that distance.  Still pretty close in galactic terms, but I sure would like to see some analysis as to what kinds of radiation levels such a nearby supernova would have caused here on Terra.

 

Best,

 

Jim 

Nearby supernovae are a different (and also interesting) topic, but the electromagnetic radiation received from a supernova at any point in space can be roughly calculated.  Taking data from Hyperphysics (link below), an arbitrary supernova might have a peak luminosity of about 10 billion Solar luminosities, lasting for about a day or less.  Let's say it's emitting P = 5 billion Solar luminosities for t = 12 hours while Terra is facing the supernova (would probably be even less energy than this I would guess).  If the supernova is D = 500 lightyears away, then the energy absorbed by the planet per unit area of atmosphere can be approximated as P*t/(4*pi*D^2).  The denominator there is the area of the sphere that the radiation is being emitted into from the supernova (i.e. a sphere that is 500 lightyears in radius), so the radiation flux decreases in proportion to the square of the distance.

 

http://hyperphysics....tro/snovcn.html

Edited by Nicole Sharp, 23 August 2019 - 07:28 PM.

[Brett Waller]

The important thing to keep in mind is that the sun, along with all the other stars, gas, etc., is revolving around the center of mass of the galaxy, and there have been more than 20+ revolutions since the formation of the solar system.  In addition, each object in the galactic disk has some relative motion with respect to most every other object in the disk, so it really isn't possible to determine what was in the vicinity of the proto-Sun immediately before it was formed.

[Nicole Sharp]

The important thing to keep in mind is that the sun, along with all the other stars, gas, etc., is revolving around the center of mass of the galaxy, and there have been more than 20+ revolutions since the formation of the solar system.  In addition, each object in the galactic disk has some relative motion with respect to most every other object in the disk, so it really isn't possible to determine what was in the vicinity of the proto-Sun immediately before it was formed.

 

That's what I was thinking.  Without a time machine, it may forever be a mystery.

 

If the supernova left behind a compact object though, then maybe we should be looking for compact objects that are older than the Solar System and about the same distance from the Galactic Center that Sol is?

[Keith Rivich]

I read on Wikipedia that the Pleiades Open Star Cluster might be the location of the supernova whose debris eventually formed the Solar System (and human beings).  Couldn't find much on Google Search to verify this theory though.  Any thoughts on this?

 

https://en.wikipedia...ki/Local_Bubble

I'm pretty sure the solar system predates the Pleiades. Pleiades star cluster is around 75 Myrs old and the solar system is 4.5 Byrs old. 

Edited by Keith Rivich, 24 August 2019 - 07:41 PM.

[llanitedave]

That's what I was thinking.  Without a time machine, it may forever be a mystery.

 

If the supernova left behind a compact object though, then maybe we should be looking for compact objects that are older than the Solar System and about the same distance from the Galactic Center that Sol is?

There should be no shortage of those.  I think there is an effort underway to see if some of the Sun's "sibling stars" can be identified, stars that would have about the same age, similar motions through space, and similar compositions that might tag them as having been formed in the same natal cluster.

 

I don't know how far that search has gotten.

[Mister T]

The important thing to keep in mind is that the sun, along with all the other stars, gas, etc., is revolving around the center of mass of the galaxy, and there have been more than 20+ revolutions since the formation of the solar system.  In addition, each object in the galactic disk has some relative motion with respect to most every other object in the disk, so it really isn't possible to determine what was in the vicinity of the proto-Sun immediately before it was formed.

Kinda like figuring out where all the ingredients for your CC Cookies were before you ran the mixer for ten minutes.

[BillP]

FWIW, this paper states that based on the measurements of 60Fe deposition on the ocean floor, that it provides evidence of a possible 2.2 million year old supernova located at a distance between 20-430 light years.  They also report the possibility of 16 supernova events in the past 13 million years within 320 light years of the Local Bubble.

 

Basically, the though is that supernovae less than 200 parsecs away are estimated to occur every 100,000 years or so (Fields, B. D.; Ellis, J. (1999). "On Deep-Ocean Fe-60 as a Fossil of a Near-Earth Supernova").  Given the age of the Earth, lots of events possible throughout our even recent geological past.

 

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.00989.pdf

Edited by BillP, 25 August 2019 - 06:17 PM.