Birth of a Solar System Witnessed In Spectacular Scientific First

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: Around a Sun-like star just 1,300 light-years away, a family of planets has been seen in its earliest moments of conception. Astronomers analyzed the infrared flow of dust and detritus left over from the formation of a baby star called HOPS-315, finding tiny concentrations of hot minerals that will eventually form planetesimals -- the 'seeds' around which new planets will grow. It's a system that can tell us about the very first steps of planet formation, and may even contain clues about how our own Solar System formed. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Is this a place where a SuperNova once happened?

[ndsurvivor]

I just always had this "feeling" that after a supernova happened, that the matter that shot out would coalesce back to the same spot, and create a new solar system, except with much more heavy atoms that can only be created by a supernova. I'm just asking opinions.

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[timeOday]

There was a theory of a "cyclic universe" in which everything started at a point and then expanded outward in the big bang, until gravity draws it all back to a point in the "big crunch" and the cycle repeats perpetually. But that fell out of favor when it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating. It's a pity since intuitively it made sense. Now, we're thought to be part of a process that only happens once, ever, in the universe?

As for individual solar systems, accordin

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[ndsurvivor]

"As for individual solar systems, according to what I just looked up, stars fizzle out and become either a white dwarf, or (for massive stars) a neutron star or black hole - but not again a star in any case."... I think that is interesting but is not intuitive to me. It is like a bunch of dust floating around, mostly hydrogen, just collapses in on itself and becomes a solar system. It seems strange. As for the "Big Crunch" theory, I have lots of thoughts about that, but I think it is still

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[NewID_of_Ami.One]

There's no "other" direction, all 'directions' are just looking back in time because light takes time to arrive from far away places. So you are seeing what happened much earlier. No way to invert that and start seeing what will happen in the future. Neither is looking 'back' like this looking back in time - its just a recorded event that already happened long ago but you are seeing it now. Like an old VHS tape of yours maybe

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[ndsurvivor]

If we can see the "Big Bang", the beginning of the Universe, then we should be able to see the outer edge of the time/space bubble that we exist in. Why can we not look in the other direction, and see evidence of that?

Re:Is this a place where a SuperNova once happened

[ChatHuant]

As for individual solar systems, according to what I just looked up, stars fizzle out and become either a white dwarf, or (for massive stars) a neutron star or black hole - but not again a star in any case.

Well, that's not quite the case. As stars age, a portion of their stellar material gets dispersed in planetary nebulae. If a star becomes a supernova, he huge explosion also disperses a lot of stellar material. Even if a star collapses to a black hole, some stellar material still gets ejected via relativistic jets.

This material, which has already been part of a star, can coalesce again, creating new stars. Supernova explosions create shock waves in the interstellar gas, creating zones of high concentration, who become new star nurseries.

The first stars after the big bang were composed mainly of hydrogen and are called population III [wikipedia.org] stars. During their lifetime, they created heavier elements (in astronomy-speak, "metals"). When population III stars died, they enriched the interstellar medium with those heavier elements, and the second generation of stars (population II stars) started their lives with higher metallicity. When population II stars died, the process repeated, and another generation (population I) came to live, reusing the stellar material of predecessor generations.

The Sun, for example, is a relatively recent population I star, and has comparably high metallicity.

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[ndsurvivor]

Have you formed an opinion as to how long it would take for Hydrogen and Helium to form stars, blow up time and time again... for all of that process to take to make up the rich elements that we enjoy on the Earth, the Gold and the Carbon? Would it be nearly 14 Billion years? Would it be a billion or two? Should it be 100 Billion years? I am trying to get a sense of how many Billions of years it may take such that a rocky planet can be filled with Oxygen and Carbon, and all of the elements on the table

"Just"

[ThumpBzztZoom]

Around a Sun-like star just 1,300 light-years away

If tomorrow someone launched a starship that could go 156 times faster than the fastest spacecraft ever launched, your (366 * great) grandchild could see this, and that's only because the time dilation reduces that by 2 generations.

Around the corner, really.

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[ndsurvivor]

Seems like time kind of stops for the traveler. At 0.99c they would experience a year, while the rest of the universe would advance 1,300 years. So it seems... it would not be the great great grandchildren, it could be you.

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[geekmux]

Seems like time kind of stops for the traveler. At 0.99c they would experience a year, while the rest of the universe would advance 1,300 years. So it seems... it would not be the great great grandchildren, it could be you.

Time is quite relative to the organic human rotting away at a rate of 0.99c.

Gonna take a lot more than prayers and vitamins for you Vulcamaniacs to make it to whenever you feel 1,300 light years is away from here.

Arthur “Green Thumb” Dent.

[geekmux]

New space exploration is cool and all (don’t forget your towel), but is there a reason we asked the professional gardener to write an article on planet formation and personify the shit out of it?

Planting planet seeds and watching our newfound baby stars take its first steps? Seriously?

Did they see God with his pick axe?

[Barsteward]

shaping the new planets?