by BDanielMayfield » Thu Feb 26, 2015 2:52 am
Ann wrote:Dad is watching wrote:As I understand it, oxygen was not made in the big bang, and that this is an area where gas/dust/oxygen is found in abundance over many light years. In sufficient quantities to collapse and form many stars and possibly more. Oxygen is made in exploding starts, as I understand it. So what went 'bang' and where is the remnant of the original body? Was it totally destroyed? How big was it?
It seems pretty certain that there has not been a supernova in the Rosette Nebula. You are correct that oxygen is often created in supernovas, but you must remember that the universe is almost fourteen billion years old, and supernovas have been going off for most of that time. That means that oxygen has been continually created for as long as there have been core-collapse supernovas, and the hydrogen gas that is found in our galaxy is mixed with certain amounts of oxygen. And it also means that the oxygen that is ionized in the Rosette Nebula wasn't created there, and it is indeed just being ionized there.
The reason why we can see the oxygen in the Rosette Nebula is twofold. First, the oxygen that is there close to the hot stars has been ionized due to the high levels of ultraviolet light close to the stars, and when the oxygen has been ionized it emits light. Second, this picture has been made with a filter that isolates emission from ionized oxygen, and this filter makes the light from the ionized oxygen in the Rosette Nebula much more visible than it would otherwise have been.
Ann
There are other reasons why oxygen is so noticeable in addition to the ones Ann mentioned. Oxygen is, after Hydrogen and Helium, the third most abundant element in the universe, so if one uses a filter that isolates for O to photograph the night sky in a place where the interstellar medium is energized by nearby bright stars it's very likely to be found. Also, O is not just produced in Supernovae; stars that are not massive enough to ever go SN are good producers of it too, and they're good at expelling it out into space as well. And since less massive stars are far more numerous than the ones that go SN, smaller stars might actually put out more O than SNs.
Bruce
[quote="Ann"][quote="Dad is watching"]As I understand it, oxygen was not made in the big bang, and that this is an area where gas/dust/oxygen is found in abundance over many light years. In sufficient quantities to collapse and form many stars and possibly more. Oxygen is made in exploding starts, as I understand it. So what went 'bang' and where is the remnant of the original body? Was it totally destroyed? How big was it? :?:[/quote]
It seems pretty certain that there has not been a supernova in the Rosette Nebula. You are correct that oxygen is often created in supernovas, but you must remember that the universe is almost fourteen billion years old, and supernovas have been going off for most of that time. That means that oxygen has been continually created for as long as there have been core-collapse supernovas, and the hydrogen gas that is found in our galaxy is mixed with certain amounts of oxygen. And it also means that the oxygen that is ionized in the Rosette Nebula wasn't created there, and it is indeed just being ionized there.
The reason why we can see the oxygen in the Rosette Nebula is twofold. First, the oxygen that is there close to the hot stars has been ionized due to the high levels of ultraviolet light close to the stars, and when the oxygen has been ionized it emits light. Second, this picture has been made with a filter that isolates emission from ionized oxygen, and this filter makes the light from the ionized oxygen in the Rosette Nebula much more visible than it would otherwise have been.
Ann[/quote]
There are other reasons why oxygen is so noticeable in addition to the ones Ann mentioned. Oxygen is, after Hydrogen and Helium, the third most abundant element in the universe, so if one uses a filter that isolates for O to photograph the night sky in a place where the interstellar medium is energized by nearby bright stars it's very likely to be found. Also, O is not just produced in Supernovae; stars that are not massive enough to ever go SN are good producers of it too, and they're good at expelling it out into space as well. And since less massive stars are far more numerous than the ones that go SN, smaller stars might actually put out more O than SNs.
Bruce