Glass made from exploding stars
The windows in are houses are quite literally allowing us to glimpse into the chaotic past of the Universe as new research has revealed that silica - the main component of glass - was originally formed inside the heart of exploding stars. In a new study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , an international team of scientists has detected silica in the remnants of two distant supernova billions of light years away from Earth. Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope the team was able to detect the unique 'fingerprint' of silica in two supernovae, Cassiopeia A and G54.1+0.3, based on the specific wavelength of light that it emitted. A supernova is a dramatic event that occurs when a massive star eventually runs out of fuel, causing it to collapse on itself and end its life with an intense explosion. It is within these explosions that individual atoms fuse together to form many of the common 'heavy' elements, like sulfur and calcium. Jeonghee Rho, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California and lead author of the paper, was able to identify grains of silica in the supernovae based on the assumption that they were shaped more like rugby balls rather than the commonly held thought that they are completely spherical. Data taken from the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory was able to complement this discovery and provide an estimate of the amount of silica that was produced by each explosion.
