A companion star could have stripped silicon layers. This supplied a brand new window into stellar demise.
Astronomers have noticed the inside layers of a dying star by a uncommon kind of stellar explosion referred to as an “extraordinarily stripped supernova.”
In a research printed on August 20, 2025, in Nature, Steve Schulze of Northwestern University in the United States and his collaborators reported on supernova 2021yfj and the thick shell of gas surrounding it.
Their results reinforce long-standing theories about what occurs inside massive stars at the end of their lives, as well as how these processes contribute to the formation of the universe’s fundamental elements.
How stars make the elements
The energy of stars comes from nuclear fusion, a reaction in which lighter atoms are pressed together to form heavier ones, releasing energy in the process.
Fusion unfolds in a sequence of stages over the lifetime of a star. Hydrogen (the lightest element) fuses into helium first, followed by progressively heavier elements such as carbon. The largest stars advance further, producing neon, oxygen, silicon, and eventually iron.
Each successive burning stage happens more quickly than the last. While hydrogen fusion can persist for millions of years, silicon fusion may last only a few days.
As the core of a massive star keeps burning, the gas outside the core acquires a layered structure, where successive layers record the composition of the progression of burning cycles.
While all this is playing out in the star’s core, the star is also shedding gas from its surface, carried out into space by the stellar wind. Each fusion cycle creates an expanding shell of gas containing a different mix of elements.
Core collapse
What happens to a massive star when its core is full of iron? The great pressure and temperature will make the iron fuse, but unlike the fusion of lighter elements, this process absorbs energy instead of releasing it.
The release of energy from fusion is what has been holding the star up against the force of gravity – so now the iron core will collapse. Depending on how big it is to start with, the collapsed core will become a neutron star or a black hole.
The method of collapse creates a “bounce,” which sends power and matter flying outwards. That is known as a core-collapse supernova explosion.
The explosion lights up the layers of gasoline shed from the star earlier, permitting us to see what they’re product of. In all recognized supernovae till now, this materials was both the hydrogen, the helium or the carbon layer, produced within the first two nuclear burning cycles.
The inside layers (the neon, oxygen, and silicon layers) are all produced in a mere few hundred years earlier than the star explodes, which suggests they don’t have time to journey out removed from the star.
An explosive thriller
However that’s what makes the brand new supernova SN2021yfj so attention-grabbing. Schulze and colleagues discovered the fabric exterior the star got here from the silicon layer, the final layer simply above the iron core, which varieties on a timescale of some months.
The stellar wind will need to have expelled all of the layers proper right down to the silicon one earlier than the explosion occurred. Astronomers don’t perceive how a stellar wind might be highly effective sufficient to do that.
Probably the most believable state of affairs is a second star was concerned. If one other star had been orbiting the one which exploded, its gravity might need quickly pulled out the deep silicon layer.
Exploding stars made the universe what it’s right this moment
Regardless of the rationalization, this view deep contained in the star has confirmed our theories of the cycles of nuclear fusion inside huge stars.
Why is that this essential? As a result of stars are the place all the weather come from.
Carbon and nitrogen are manufactured primarily by decrease mass stars, just like our personal Solar. Some heavy components comparable to gold are manufactured within the unique environments of colliding and merging neutron stars.
Nonetheless, oxygen and different components comparable to neon, magnesium, and sulfur primarily come from core-collapse supernovae.
We’re what we’re due to the inside workings of stars. The fixed manufacturing of components in stars causes the universe to vary constantly. Stars and planets fashioned later are very completely different from these fashioned in earlier occasions.
When the universe was youthful it had a lot much less in the best way of “attention-grabbing” components. All the things labored considerably in a different way: stars burned hotter and quicker and planets could have fashioned much less, in a different way, or in no way.
How a lot supernovae explode and simply what they eject into interstellar area is a important query in determining why our Universe and our world are the best way they’re.
Reference: “Extraordinarily stripped supernova reveals a silicon and sulfur formation website” by Steve Schulze, Avishay Gal-Yam, Luc Dessart, Adam A. Miller, Stan E. Woosley, Yi Yang (杨轶), Mattia Bulla, Ofer Yaron, Jesper Sollerman, Alexei V. Filippenko, Ok-Ryan Hinds, Daniel A. Perley, Daichi Tsuna, Ragnhild Lunnan, Nikhil Sarin, Seán J. Brennan, Thomas G. Brink, Rachel J. Bruch, Ping Chen, Kaustav Ok. Das, Suhail Dhawan, Claes Fransson, Christoffer Fremling, Anjasha Gangopadhyay, Ido Irani, Anders Jerkstrand, Nikola Knežević, Doron Kushnir, Keiichi Maeda, Kate Maguire, Eran Ofek, Conor M. B. Omand, Yu-Jing Qin, Yashvi Sharma, Tawny Sit, Gokul P. Srinivasaragavan, Nora L. Strothjohann, Yuki Takei, Eli Waxman, Lin Yan, Yuhan Yao, WeiKang Zheng, Erez A. Zimmerman, Eric C. Bellm, Michael W. Coughlin, Frank J. Masci, Josiah Purdum, Mickaël Rigault, Avery Wold and Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, 20 August 2025, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09375-3
Tailored from an article initially printed in The Dialog.
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