The Milky Way and Beyond (19 page)

The overwhelming preponderance of hydrogen suggests that all the nuclei were built from this simplest element, a hypothesis first proposed many years ago and widely accepted for a time. According to this now-defunct idea, all matter was initially compressed into one huge ball of neutrons. As the universe began to expand, its density decreased and the neutrons decayed into protons and electrons. The protons then captured neutrons, one after another, underwent beta decay (ejection of electrons), and synthesized the heavy elements. A major difficulty with this hypothesis, among various other problems, is that atomic masses 5 and 8 are unstable, and there is no known way to build heavier nuclei by successive neutron capture.

A large body of evidence now supports the idea that only the nuclei of hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of other light nuclei such as lithium, beryllium, and boron, were produced in the aftermath of the big bang, the hot explosion from which the universe is thought to have emerged, whereas the heavier nuclei were, and continue to be, produced in stars. The majority of them, however, are fashioned only in the most massive stars and some only for a short period of time after supernova explosions.

The splitting in the spectral sequence among the cooler stars can be understood in terms of composition differences. The M-type stars appear to have a normal (i.e., solar) makeup, with oxygen more abundant than carbon and the zirconium group of elements much less abundant than the titanium group. The R-type and N-type stars often contain more carbon than oxygen, whereas the S-type stars appear to have an enhanced content of zirconium as compared with titanium.

Other abundance anomalies are found in a peculiar class of higher temperature stars, called Wolf-Rayet (or W) stars, in which objects containing predominantly helium, carbon, and oxygen are distinguished from those containing helium and nitrogen, some carbon, and little observed oxygen. These stars are extremely hot white stars that have peculiar spectra thought to indicate either great turbulence within the star or a steady, voluminous ejection of material. A typical Wolf-Rayet star is several times
the diameter of the Sun and thousands of times more luminous. Only a few hundred are known, located mostly in the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy. (The type was first distinguished in 1867 by the French astronomers Charles-Joseph-Étienne Wolf and Georges-Antoine-Pons Rayet.) Significantly, all these abundance anomalies are found in stars thought to be well advanced in their evolutionary development. No main-sequence dwarfs display such effects.

A most critical observation is the detection of the unstable element technetium in the S-type stars. This element has been produced synthetically in nuclear laboratories on Earth, and its longest-lived isotope, technetium-99, is known to have a half-life of 200,000 years. The implication is that this element must have been produced within the past few hundred thousand years in the stars where it has been observed, suggesting furthermore that this nucleosynthetic process is at work at least in some stars today. How the star upwells this heavy element from the core (where it is produced) to the surface (near where it is observed) in such a short time without the star's exploding provides an impressive challenge to theoreticians.

Researchers have been able to demonstrate how elements might be created in stars by nuclear processes occurring at very high temperatures and densities. No one mechanism can account for all the elements; rather, several distinct processes occurring at different epochs during the late evolution of a star have been proposed.

After hydrogen, helium is the most abundant element. Most of it was probably produced in the initial big bang. Helium is the normal ash of hydrogen consumption, and in the dense cores of highly evolved stars, helium itself is consumed to form, successively, carbon-12, oxygen-16, neon-20, and magnesium-24. By this time in the core of a sufficiently massive star, the temperature has reached some 700 million K. Under these conditions, particles such as protons, neutrons, and helium-4 nuclei also can interact with the newly created nuclei to produce a variety of other elements such as fluorine and sodium. Because these “uneven” elements are produced in lesser quantities than those divisible by four, both the peaks and troughs in the curve of cosmic abundances can be explained.

As the stellar core continues to shrink and the central temperature and density are forced even higher, a fundamental difficulty is soon reached. A temperature of roughly one billion K is sufficient to create silicon (silicon-28) by the usual method of helium capture. This temperature, however, is also high enough to begin to break apart silicon as well as some of the other newly synthesized nuclei. A “semi-equilibrium” is set up in the star's core—a balance of sorts between the production and destruction (photodisintegration) of silicon. Ironically, though destructive, this situation is suitable for the production of even heavier
nuclei up to and including iron (iron-56), again through the successive capture of helium nuclei.

If the temperature and the density of the core continue to rise, the iron-group nuclei tend to break down into helium nuclei, but a large amount of energy is suddenly consumed in the process. The star then suffers a violent implosion, or collapse, after which it soon explodes as a supernova.

The term
supernova
is derived from
nova
(Latin: “new”), the name for another type of exploding star. Supernovae resemble novae in several respects. Both are characterized by a tremendous, rapid brightening lasting for a few weeks, followed by a slow dimming. Spectroscopically, they show blue-shifted emission lines, which imply that hot gases are blown outward. But a supernova explosion, unlike a nova outburst, is a cataclysmic event for a star, one that essentially ends its active (i.e., energy-generating) lifetime. When a star “goes supernova,” considerable amounts of its matter, equaling the material of several Suns, may be blasted into space with such a burst of energy as to enable the exploding star to outshine its entire home galaxy.

Supernovae explosions release not only tremendous amounts of radio waves and X-rays but also cosmic rays. Some gamma-ray bursts have been associated with supernovae. Supernovae also release many of the heavier elements that make up the components of the solar system, including Earth, into the interstellar medium. Spectral analyses show that abundances of the heavier elements are greater than normal, indicating that these elements do indeed form during the course of the explosion. The shell of a supernova remnant continues to expand until, at a very advanced stage, it dissolves into the interstellar medium.

Historically, only seven supernovae are known to have been recorded before the early 17th century. The most famous of them occurred in 1054 and was seen in one of the horns of the constellation Taurus. The remnants of this explosion are visible today as the Crab Nebula, which is composed of glowing ejecta of gases flying outward in an irregular fashion and a rapidly spinning, pulsating neutron star, called a pulsar, in the centre. The supernova of 1054 was recorded by Chinese and Korean observers; it also may have been seen by southwestern American Indians, as suggested by certain rock paintings discovered in Arizona and New Mexico. It was bright enough to be seen during the day, and its great luminosity lasted for weeks. Other prominent supernovae are known to have been observed from Earth in 185, 393, 1006, 1181, 1572, and 1604.

The closest and most easily observed of the hundreds of supernovae that have been recorded since 1604 was first sighted on the morning of Feb. 24, 1987, by the
Canadian astronomer Ian K. Shelton while working at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Designated SN 1987A, this formerly extremely faint object attained a magnitude of 4.5 within just a few hours, thus becoming visible to the unaided eye. The newly appearing supernova was located in the Large Magellanic Cloud at a distance of about 160,000 light-years. It immediately became the subject of intense observation by astronomers throughout the Southern Hemisphere and was observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. SN 1987A's brightness peaked in May 1987, with a magnitude of about 2.9, and slowly declined in the following months.

Supernovae may be divided into two broad classes, Type I and Type II, according to the way in which they detonate. Type I supernovae may be up to three times brighter than Type II; they also differ from Type II supernovae in that their spectra contain no hydrogen lines and they expand about twice as rapidly.

The so-called classic explosion, associated with Type II supernovae, has as progenitor a very massive star (a Population I star) of at least eight solar masses that is at the end of its active lifetime. (These are seen only in spiral galaxies, most often near the arms.) Until this stage of its evolution, the star has shone by means of the nuclear energy released at and near its core in the process of squeezing and heating lighter elements such as hydrogen or helium into successively heavier elements—i.e., in the process of nuclear fusion. Forming elements heavier than iron absorbs rather than produces energy, however, and, since energy is no longer available, an iron core is built up at the centre of the aging, heavyweight star. When the iron core becomes too massive, its ability to support itself by means of the outward explosive thrust of internal fusion reactions fails to counteract the tremendous pull of its own gravity. Consequently, the core collapses. If the core's mass is less than about three solar masses, the collapse continues until the core reaches a point at which its constituent nuclei and free electrons are crushed together into a hard, rapidly spinning core. This core consists almost entirely of neutrons, which are compressed in a volume only 20 km (12 miles) across but whose combined weight equals that of several Suns. A teaspoonful of this extraordinarily dense material would weigh 50 billion tons on Earth. Such an object is called a neutron star.

The supernova detonation occurs when material falls in from the outer layers of the star and then rebounds off the core, which has stopped collapsing and suddenly presents a hard surface to the infalling gases. The shock wave generated by this collision propagates outward and blows off the star's outer gaseous layers. The amount of material blasted outward depends on the star's original mass.

If the core mass exceeds three solar masses, the core collapse is too great to produce a neutron star; the imploding star is compressed into an even smaller and denser body—namely, a black hole. Infalling material disappears into the
black hole, the gravitational field of which is so intense that not even light can escape. The entire star is not taken in by the black hole, since much of the falling envelope of the star either rebounds from the temporary formation of a spinning neutron core or misses passing through the very centre of the core and is spun off instead.

Type I supernovae can be divided into subgroups, Ia, Ib, Ic, on the basis of their spectra. The exact nature of the explosion mechanism in Type I generally is still uncertain, although Ia supernovae, at least, are thought to originate in binary systems consisting of a moderately massive star and a white dwarf, with material flowing to the white dwarf from its larger companion. A thermonuclear explosion results if the flow of material is sufficient to raise the mass of the white dwarf above the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.44 solar masses. Unlike the case of an ordinary nova, for which the mass flow is less and only a superficial explosion results, the white dwarf in a Ia supernova explosion is presumably destroyed completely. Radioactive elements, notably nickel-56, are formed. When nickel-56 decays to cobalt-56 and the latter to iron-56, significant amounts of energy are released, providing perhaps most of the light emitted during the weeks following the explosion.

Type Ia supernovae are useful probes of the structure of the universe, since they all have the same luminosity. By measuring the apparent brightness of these objects, one also measures the expansion rate of the universe and that rate's variation with time. Dark energy, a repulsive force that is the dominant component (73 percent) of the universe, was discovered in 1998 with this method. Type Ia supernovae that exploded when the universe was only two-thirds of its present size were fainter and thus farther away than they would be in a universe without dark energy. This implies that the expansion rate of the universe is faster now than it was in the past, a result of the current dominance of dark energy. (Dark energy was negligible in the early universe.)

In the catastrophic events leading to a supernova explosion and for roughly 1,000 seconds thereafter, a great variety of nuclear reactions can take place. These processes seem to be able to explain the trace abundances of all the known elements heavier than iron.

Two situations have been envisioned, and both involve the capture of neutrons. When a nucleus captures a neutron, its mass increases by one atomic unit and its charge remains the same. Such a nucleus is often too heavy for its charge and might emit an electron (beta particle) to attain a more stable state. It then becomes a nucleus of the next higher element in the periodic table of the elements. In the first such process, called the slow, or
s
, process, the flux of neutrons is low. A nucleus captures a neutron and leisurely emits a beta particle; its nuclear charge then increases by one.

Beta decay is often very slow, and, if the flux of neutrons is high, the nucleus might capture another neutron before
there is time for it to undergo decay. In this rapid, or
r
, process, the evolution of a nucleus can be very different from that in a slow process. In supernova explosions, vast quantities of neutrons can be produced, and these could result in the rapid buildup of massive elements. One interesting feature of the synthesis of heavy elements by neutron capture at a high rate in a supernova explosion is that nuclei much heavier than lead or even uranium can be fashioned. These in turn can decay by fission, releasing additional amounts of energy.