Picture of The Day: Your Stellar Parents

image source

I know that I write about our origin from the stars not the first time, just can't stop. This fact is so amazing and incredible that it's impossible not to marvel at this everyday. And today I came across a wonderful article on the Chandra website with a photo of Cassiopea A.

This star is at a distance of 11,000 light years from our planet, and the light from its explosion first reached us in 1680. This is not just another beautiful Wallpaper for lovers of space, but a perfect demonstration of the chemical composition of a supernova:

image source

Spectral analysis allows estimating the percentage of chemical substances directly at the time of the explosion and their quantity that is carried to outer space.

The Chandra data indicate that the supernova that produced Cas A has churned out prodigious amounts of key cosmic ingredients. Cas A has dispersed about 10,000 Earth masses worth of sulfur alone, and about 20,000 Earth masses of silicon. The iron in Cas A has the mass of about 70,000 times that of the Earth, and astronomers detect a whopping one million Earth masses worth of oxygen being ejected into space from Cas A, equivalent to about three times the mass of the Sun. (Even though oxygen is the most abundant element in Cas A, its X-ray emission is spread across a wide range of energies and cannot be isolated in this image, unlike the other elements that are shown.) [source]

The star contains all the elements needed to create DNA. However, a detailed analysis of the correlation of substances has shown that we are not only composed of the remnants of supernovae, but also from other space objects.

Approximately 73% of the substance of our bodies originated in supernova explosions, another 16.5% in outbreaks of Nova (less massive stars), with 9.5% of our body was formed at the time of formation of the Universe during the Big Bang, and 1%, we could borrow from the destroyed white dwarfs. And here you are:

image source

So now, to the "Your momma so fat" jokes you can add something like: Your momma so fat she eats small stars and has the gravity of a million suns.... Yes, my humor is lame.

---

#Sciencepop - science popularization. I suggest you use this tag in order to share interesting news, photos, stories from the world of science in a short format. Hundreds of scientific discoveries occur around the world every day. But they may contain insufficient data to create a full-fledged article or seem rather boring for usual readers, because of the strong scientific specifics. Although, I see that steemit community loves science in all its manifestations.