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No Rare Cosmic Pollutants Need Apply

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7/20/00 1:20 p.m.
No Rare Cosmic Pollutants Need Apply
Some great new info from NASA.

By John Farrell, writer and video producer in Boston

hanks to new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, we can now confirm what environmental extremists have been shrieking for years: Human beings are just a bunch of "rare cosmic pollutants."

The Chandra, which orbits Earth like the Hubble Telescope, has recently been focusing on a cloud close to the constellation Cassiopeia. Called Cassiopeia A, or Cas A, it's an interstellar cloud that measures 13 light years across. Check out: this picture

and this picture.

With a decent telescope or even a pair of binoculars, you should be able to see it, 45 degrees north-northeast above the horizon right after sunset, between Cassiopeia and Cepheus. (If, like me, you have to make up your own constellations because you can't understand what the Greeks were trying to picture when they named them, make yourself three margaritas, then look for the head of a cat on its hind legs.)

Cas A is significant because it's the youngest supernova remnant in the Milky Way, the left-over explosion cloud of a star that blew itself to smithereens about 9,400 years ago. Since it's 9,100 light years away, the light coming from the explosion could have been seen by us in the late 1600s. Unfortunately, with the possible exception of British Royal Astronomer Sir John Flamsteed, most people at the time were otherwise engaged and missed out. (Baffling, since nobody had TV back then.)

According to Spacescience.com's report of the findings, Chandra's cool Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer allows it to measure x-ray photons and match them to specific chemical elements in the cloud. Images of Cas A reveal the distribution of heavy elements: oxygen, silicon and iron in the supernova's rapidly expanding shell.

What most fascinates astronomers about Cas A is that the heaviest of the elements, iron, seems to be nearest to the outer edge of the cloud, even though material rich in iron is created at the inner core of massive stars. Apparently the iron "knots" were flung farthest by the explosion that created Cas A.

This envelope of debris is ballooning outward at 800 km/s. At this speed, images taken by Chandra in the coming years will be able to record how streams of matter in the shell spread out, and suggest more clearly to scientists how solar systems like our own formed.

The sun is considered a second-generation star, forming amidst the ruin of a previous supernova. All the gold, nickel, iron, and heavy elements that go to make up the planet came out of another star's plumbing. There's just no other way to make these elements, and compared to the amount of hydrogen and helium that constitutes the other 99% or so of matter in the universe, these elements are indeed pretty rare. We're basically made of stellar leftovers or, as the late Carl Sagan once said, "star stuff."

It's hard to overestimate how lucky we are that a supernova happened in our cosmic neighborhood before the sun was formed: We simply wouldn't be here otherwise. While the number of supernovas throughout the visible universe does keep astronomers busy, stars in our galaxy aren't exactly going off like the kernels in a pan of Jiffy Pop.

Much as I like to make fun of the show Cosmos, I have to admit that there are two episodes that are worth keeping and viewing repeatedly. One is the episode showing how Kepler came up with his laws of planetary motion.

The other is when Captain Carl gets to see a supernova up close. I still keep these two episodes on the old 3/4 inch Umatic tapes I made when the show was on the air, and even today with all the digital special effects we enjoy at the movies, Carl's supernova is still pretty cool. (Of course, you have to see the dumb cutaway of his face as he watches all this, but that's okay; the explosion itself is pretty nifty).

The good news is, our sun will not blow up the way a supernova does, instantly smashing the earth to little pieces. The bad news is that, instead, the sun will do a slow swell, burning the oceans away to space, frying everything to cinders, and in general living up to every worst bit you can imagine from the Book of Revelation.

If we're smart, we'll have invented hyperdrives by then and be well out of here...

Click here for more information about the Chandra X-Ray observatory.

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