(ORDO NEWS) — The researchers said that the unique stone found in Egypt did not come to us from the solar system, but was formed before the formation of the solar system.
In 2013, researchers stated that a small rock found in southwestern Egypt was not from Earth. Two years later, analysis showed that it was not included in any of the known types of meteorites or comets.
Ten years later, researchers figured out the origin of the rock known as Hypatia – it was a supernova explosion outside the solar system.
Analysis of the stone suggests that this may be the first tangible evidence of a supernova explosion. One of the biggest explosions in the universe is caused by a dying star, which is almost five times the mass of our Sun and destroyed itself in one last “breath”.
The results, published in the journal Icarus, reject the earlier theory of the origin of the stone, as researchers have put together a complete timeline stretching back to the early stages of the formation of the Earth, Sun and other planets in the solar system.
According to scientists, it all started when a red giant star turned into a white dwarf inside a giant dust cloud.
The white dwarf was part of a binary system with another stellar companion, which it eventually devoured. The researchers say that at some point, the “hungry” white dwarf exploded as a Type Ia supernova inside the dust cloud.
Once the explosion cooled down, the gas atoms left over from the supernova began to stick to particles in the dust cloud. Over millions of years, gas turned into solid rock – somewhere in the early stages of the formation of the solar system.
Scientists suggest that this happened in the cold outer solar system in the Oort cloud or in the Kuiper belt. And over time, the resulting rock rushed to the Earth. The heating from Earth’s re-entry, combined with impact pressure in the Great Sand Sea in southwest Egypt, created microdiamonds and shattered the rock.
The researchers used several methods to analyze the stone and piece together a timeline of its journey to Earth. A 2013 study showed that the stone was not formed on Earth, meaning it was of extraterrestrial origin. A 2015 study of the noble gases in the fragment showed that it could not be from any known type of meteorite or comet.
The researchers concluded that Hypatia did not form on Earth, was not part of any known type of comet or meteorite, was not formed from the middle dust of the inner Solar System, nor was it formed from the middle interstellar dust. It was then that they began to suspect that supernova-type events were causing the formation of the stone.
Researchers believe the Hypatia stone will hold the key to a cosmic story that began during the early formation of the solar system and was found years later on Earth in a remote desert.
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