In 1996, a rock from space was discovered in southwestern Egypt’s Great Sand Sea. Even by extraterrestrial standards, the stone was different, and a team of researchers surveying the rock’s chemistry now formulate that it came from a supernova, which is the brilliant, explosive collapse of a star.
The rock is called Hypatia, and afterward on the 4th-century Egyptian mathematician. Based on the structure of 15 elements in a 3-gram sample of the stone, a team of researchers doubts that Hypatia arrived from well beyond our stellar neighborhood and occurred from the gas and dusty residue that followed a foreign star’s explosion. Their research is, however, published in the journal Icarus.
“In a sense, we could say, we have ‘caught’ a supernova Ia explosion ‘in the act’, because the gas atoms from the explosion were caught in the surrounding dust cloud, which eventually formed Hypatia’s parent body,” declared Jan Kramers. He is a geochemist at the University of Johannesburg in a university release.
Kramers has been studying Hypatia for roughly a decade. In 2013, argon isotopes from the rock verified Hypatia’s extraterrestrial origins, and related studies in 2015 and 2018 implied that Hypatia was neither from any recognized comet or meteorite nor our solar system. Utilizing a proton microprobe, the team examined the elemental composition of Hypatia. They found that the elements from the rock demonstrated that it didn’t even appear from interstellar dust in our limb of the Milky Way.
