Presolar Grains are Excellent Probes of Astrophysical Processes (IMAGE)

Carnegie Institution for Science

Presolar Grains are Excellent Probes of Astrophysical Processes

Caption

An electron microscope image of a micron-sized supernova silicon carbide, SiC, stardust grain (lower right) extracted from a primitive meteorite. Such grains originated more than 4.6 billion years ago in the ashes of Type II supernovae, typified here (upper left) by a Hubble Space Telescope image of the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova explosion in 1054. Laboratory analysis of such tiny dust grains provides unique information on these massive stellar explosions. (1 μm is one millionth of a meter.)

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Image credits: NASA and Larry Nittler.

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