“Pretty much everything around us comes from dying stars,” Ashall said in a media statement. “We’re made of stardust. Being able to study that fact—what we’re made out of—in detail, and to understand where the elements around us come from, is truly amazing.”
Stars produce heavy elements through the process of stellar nucleosynthesis. As stars burn, die, and explode, thermonuclear reactions take place inside them.
Supernovae are one of the highest-temperature and highest-density places in the universe. The material in stars burns and burns to form heavier and heavier elements, from hydrogen to helium, helium to carbon, carbon to oxygen, and so forth, all the way through the Periodic Table to iron.
When the stars finally explode, they throw all of this material back out into the universe at speeds up to 30% of the speed of light to make the next generation of stars and planets. “That’s how the planet and everything around us can have all of these heavy elements,” Ashall said. “They were made in dying stars.”
It’s widely accepted that most of the heavy elements in the universe are made by way of stellar nucleosynthesis, but Ashall wants to know more—to trace particular elements to the varieties of supernovae out there and to measure at what levels those elements are made by the stars.
Ashall’s second project will focus on detecting carbon monoxide and silicon monoxide, also building blocks for life in the universe, in core-collapse supernovae.