Early supernovae may have filled the universe with planet-forming dust

By Hannah Richter, Science. 

Excerpt: “Dust is the building block of the universe,” says Melissa Shahbandeh, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). Over millions of years, specks of cosmic dust and gas clump together to form large, dense clouds from which planets and stars are born. But the dust’s own origins have been mysterious. Now, in data from NASA’s JWST space observatory, Shahbandeh and her colleagues have found a source for the dust that filled the early universe: giant stellar explosions called interacting supernovae, whose intense shockwaves can blast out dusty plumes that accumulated in the supernovae’s surroundings. These results, presented last week at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society and submitted to The Astrophysical Journal are “impressive,” says Lifan Wang, an astrophysicist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the work. ...The findings...deepen understanding of where Earth and everything on it came from, Shahbandeh says. “If we can understand how [dust] formed from the early times … then maybe we can understand how we got here.”... 

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