New discovery shows glass made from exploding stars

The next time you're gazing out of the window in search of inspiration, keep in mind the material you're looking through was forged inside the heart of an exploding ancient star.

An international team of scientists said Friday they had detected silica—the main component of glass—in the remnants of two distant supernovae billions of light years from Earth.

Researchers used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to analyse the light emitted by the collapsing mega-cluster and obtain silica's "fingerprint" based on the specific wavelength of light the material is known to emit.

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NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has mapped the debris of a supernova and discovered that the explosion may have turned the original star inside out.

Peering into the heart of the inverted star, astronomers have found the atoms of life itself.

This Chandra X-ray video shows the elements distribution in supernova remnant Cas A. The distributions of sulfur, silicon, magnesium and neon are similar.

Oxygen, which according to theoretical models is the most abundant element in the remnant, is difficult to detect because the X-ray emission characteristic of oxygen ions is strongly absorbed by gas in along the line of sight to Cas A, and because almost all the oxygen ions have had all their electrons stripped away

A new study using observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals the first clear-cut evidence that the expanding debris of exploded stars produces some of the fastest-moving matter in the universe. This discovery is a major step toward meeting one of Fermi's primary mission goals.

Cosmic rays are subatomic particles that move through space at nearly the speed of light. About 90 percent of them are protons, with the remainder consisting of electrons and atomic nuclei. In their journey across the galaxy, the electrically charged particles become deflected by magnetic fields. This scrambles their paths and makes it impossible to trace their origins directly.