Where was the star that we are made of?

[tpeezy]

I know that all the heavier elements came from inside of a star. I was wondering billions and billions of years ago a star or stars had to explode to provide the raw materials for our solar system to be made of, like the hydrogen and helium our star is made of, and the carbon that we are made of. I was wondering if any scientist have theorized on where that star would have been? Would it have been where the gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn are now because of all the hydrogen and helium that makes up those planets? Or did it explode somewhere near pluto pushing the heavier elements farthest away where the rocky planets now are? I was just wondering because I was watching a show on the science channel I think and they said that our solar system was formed by an accretion disk I believe, I might be wrong about that, but I think thats what they said, and I was wondering where that star that blew up would have probably been located. Anyone have any ideas or guesses? Sorry if this is a dumb question.

 

[ramparts]

Well, it's impossible to tell for a few reasons. First of all, space isn't objective so there really isn't any way of saying "where" But let's say defined relative to the center of the galaxy (as an example). Then it would almost certainly not have been located anywhere near, much less within, our solar system. A small star like the Sun won't be able to make new stars when it dies - it's only the super massive stars which do, and those give birth to a whole bunch of new stars. The gas from a star's supernova will travel pretty far into space, so that the nebulae which form and eventually give birth to new stars are much, much larger than our solar system. On top of that, there are two more considerations. First, everything in the galaxy is always orbit around the center, so we may well have been on a different side of the galaxy when the Sun was formed. Second, all stars have further motion relative to that orbit around the galactic center, so there's yet more motion which would take us far away from wherever in the galaxy we were when the Sun was born.

 

[robnissen]

Would it have been where the gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn are now because of all the hydrogen and helium that makes up those planets?

Ramparts is completely correct. But there is also another flaw in your question, which I have quoted above. Hydrogen, and to a lesser extent Helium do not need to come from other stars, but are generally left over from the big bang (Helium is also formed in other stars). So no supernova was necessary to supply the hydrogen and helium in the solar system.

 

[tpeezy]

yah I knew that there was some hydrogen and helium after the big bang I just figured that most would have been used to make a stars that we are made of by the time the gas giants were made. Thank you for the answers though, So do you think that we all came from the same massive star or many different massive stars in the same area? I wish I could hit rewind in super speed and watch where every single atom that I am made of came from until eventually it goes all the way back to the stars demise

 

[robnissen]

My WAG is that the vast majority of heavy elements came from a single SN. The amount of heavy elements in the SS is a very small percentage of the mass of the SS, so they could have easily come from a single SN. But this is only a guess, I don't believe there is anyway we can know the answer to this question.

 

[SpaceTas]

I am recalling an article I read long ago; so updates would be welcome. The solar system nebula was seeded by more than on supernova. There are three (?) sets of element ages within the micro-diamonds found in meteorites with the latest a billion years or so before the formation of the solar system. That last one presumably is the supernova that triggered the cloud collapse that formed the Sun and its siblings.

As ramparts mentioned the Sun has moved far from its original birthplace. In fact the sun has done many orbits of the galaxy since. The further point is that the dust/gas clouds that form stars also orbit and interact with each other, and so get mixed up and added to by many supernovae. Remember that the stars that go supernova are massive and so only last a few million years which is much shorter than one orbit.

There is a galaxy wide pattern with more "metals" (= elements with higher atomic mass than helium) toward the center.

 

[neilsox]

I agree, we probably can't know, but some one has likely attempted, so you may get a possibly wrong answer yet. Main stream does assume that our galaxy rotates approximately in lockstep, as proper motion of the nearby stars is considerably less than than the speed at which we orbit the mass center of our galaxy.
The perhaps 50 solar mass star that provided most of the heavy elements for our solar system likely went supernova about 6 billion years ago, perhaps as recently as 5 billion years ago, as our Sun, Earth etc formed about 4.6 billion years ago. What remains today is a perhaps a 20 solar mass black hole traveling perhaps 100,000 kilometers per hour with respect to our Sun. The speed difference likely has not changed much, so in 100 million hours the separation is 10,000 billion kilometers = one light year. In 100 trillion hours; one million light years. 100 trillion hours is 416.66666 billion days is 1141 million years, so the black hole left our galaxy long ago if my arithmetic is correct. Perhaps this is why we have not found many 20 solar mass black holes in our galaxy = most of them are in intergalactic space. I'm guessing, tell me where I have gone wrong. Neil

 

[robnissen]

I'm guessing, tell me where I have gone wrong. Neil

Two points: First a SN does not have to end with a BH, it could be a neutron star, or IIRC, if it ejects enough mass, a white dwarf? Second, what is your basis for assuming that whatever was left, BH, Neutron star or White Dwarf, would not just continue to orbit the MW? Why would it need to be booted?

 

[SpaceTas]

There is a large project to try and find the sun siblings and then trace back to the birth region and cloud.
It is going to use a new spectrograph (HERMES) on the 4m Anglo Australian Telescope. It should start in the next couple of years. It is similar to the RAVE project but this spectrograph has enough resolution + sensitivity to measure the detailed chemical composition of each star rather than just the radial velocity. By matching compositions be able to find the siblings, then using radial velocities, distances, any transverse motion backtrack these stars back to their common origin.

Here is a link: http://www.aao.gov.au/AAO/HERMES/project_outline.html