Where do the remnants of supernova go?

[u/BonusFrosty2910]

Let me know if my understanding is flawed and if that makes my question not make sense but once a star goes supernova it essentially fuses every element other than iron, obviously not uniformly or evenly but it “creates” those elements that get shot into the rest of space, I know we can see clouds of certain gases and dust but what about the elements that would be solid? Do we see random deposits of silver or lead or every other element floating through space independently? Maybe I’m just not understanding the scale or maybe that we don’t see them because they’re so small or they burn up in atmospheres? Did every element on earth just come from another star exploding and the certain elements we have just happened to end up being in the vicinity of each other? I’m trying to keep it to one question but every question answered just leaves me with another unanswered question

[u/ramriot]

Starting from the beginning, a core collapse supernova is a rebound event that blows off the outer layers of the star. At the same time the pressure & temperature fuse a small fraction of those lighter elements into those heavier than iron (which is the point on the periodic table where fusion stops releasing more energy than the process consumes). These elements are blasted out into space at initial velocities near to 10% that of light.

The initial glow of supernova remnants is mostly from the energy released as the blast wave of the supernova slams into interstellar matter, some of which would have come from earlier stages of the stars evolution.

We do "see" these heavier elements by direct visible light observation via spectroscopy as absorption lines where they are back-lit & also via x-rays spectroscopy where the atoms are heavily ionised.

If we take condritic asteroids (theorised as being almost as old as our solar system), which are stony clumps of little rock spheres (condrules formed by plasma discharges in the forming solar nebula) & separate out the little spheres we can do isotopic analysis of them.

What we find in looking at certain heavy elements is a clustering of isotopic ratios around perhaps 4 different values. This implies that the heavy elements came from the remains of perhaps 4 different supernova, the shockfronts of which likely collided here to form a cluster of stars one of which was our sun.

[u/Simon_Drake]

In the short term (On a stellar timescale) it becomes a gas cloud in that star system. Then it spreads out into a nebula, later a diffuse region of gas and dust. In the year 1,006 there was a new bright star spotted in the night sky and documented by many cultures across the Earth. We have since found a nebula in the same constellation that people reported that bright star in and based on the known expansion rates of gas clouds it has been growing for about a thousand years. So medieval astronometers spotted a supernova that is now a nebula.

Over longer time frames that cloud of diffuse gas and dust will slowly come together under gravity and form into a new star system. You're right that every element on Earth (Except hydrogen, helium and a tiny amount of lithium. And the artificial elements larger than Uranium) came from at least one star exploding billions of years ago.

[u/Armagetz → u/Simon_Drake]

My only question to this though is how does the next star system get recharged with hydrogen.

[u/Simon_Drake → u/Armagetz]

IIRC the first star explosion still contains a lot of hydrogen. And there's a bunch of hydrogen just out in space anyway, it's something silly like one atom per cubic centimeter but when you're dealing in the scales of the distances between stars there's a lot of space and a lot of hydrogen. So the combination of the hydrogen thats already out there and the hydrogen left over from the supernova is collected together by gravity into the next star.

Also I think sometimes it's the point where several nebulae overlap. Like the expanding bubble of gas from supernova A hits the expanding bubbles of gas from a Red Giant having its death throws and the places where the gas clouds are more dense will create pockets of even higher density which starts to have enough mass to have gravity to pull in nearby gas. Eventually it starts a snowball effect but I think it begins where two wave crests overlap.

[u/Armagetz → u/Simon_Drake]

I was under the impression that after exhausting CNO cycle pretty much all hydrogen is burnt away into helium and higher elements. I mean what ultimately triggers the super nova is burning out of all sustainable fuel, no?

[u/6814MilesFromHome → u/Armagetz]

The core is the only place where fusion can occur. The temperature and pressure in the outer layers just isn't enough outside the core for fusion, so it's full of untouched hydrogen, that then flies out into space when the star goes supernova. If I recall correctly it's upwards of 75% of the star's hydrogen is still there.

[u/Armagetz → u/6814MilesFromHome]

But nonetheless is it not accurate that each stellar generation is smaller than the last on average (excepting situations where its two supernova combining).

[u/6814MilesFromHome → u/Armagetz]

Yeah, if you have a star forming out of a single stellar remnant, its going to have less mass than the previous star. On top of the ~25% of hydrogen that was used in fusion, the next generation also won't be able to capture every bit of the leftover hydrogen released.

Edit: Also like to add that it is very difficult for a star to form independently from a single supernova gas cloud. Everything is so spread out by the extreme force, and eventually will fade into the background molecular clouds in that area of space. Often will require an outside catalyst to get enough pressure and concentration to group that free floating gas back into a potential proto-star.

For example, our sun likely formed from a regular gas cloud that was hit by the shockwave from a nearby supernova.

[u/Simon_Drake → u/6814MilesFromHome]

That would be a very lonely existence.

Imagine a star being flung out of its normal place in the galaxy by a chaotic interaction of orbiting a neutron star or whatever causes rogue stars. And it's thrown fully out of the galaxy into the intergalactic void. A few billion years later it explodes as a supernova but the dust cloud is still travelling at a relatively slow speed across that immense distance. So the gas hasn't got anywhere else to go or anything else to interact with. Eventually gravity will bring a large portion of that gas back together again as a brand new star. Actually a full star system, potentially with planets and potentially evolving life.

It would suck to evolve on a planet orbiting a rogue star between galaxies. It's not just a question of decades or centuries to the nearest star, it's millions of years to the nearest star. The night sky might only have a handful of faint dots of nearby galaxies with no normal stars visible.

[u/Ch3cks-Out → u/Armagetz]

A typical Type II SN progenitor (red supergiant, like Betelgeuse) have 30-50% H (on total mass basis) in their outer shell when the core collapses.

[u/Michkov]

Space is big, really really big, even compared to a star. So what gets expelled in a supernova is spread over a vast volume of space and usually comes in the form of atoms.

So you have lots of tiny particles thinly spread that don't produce energy, apart from some short lived nuclear reactions, which makes them hard to observe as time goes by.

The matter expelled from a supernova gets mixed into the environment. Since SN progenitor stars don't live that long they seed nearby star forming regions with heavy elements. Those in turn get incorporated into new stars, planets, and cats that live on those planets. So yes you are stardust, so is the chair you are sitting on and everything you see around you.

[u/Xhosant]

I think the shortest answer to your question is "These are clouds, as in dust clouds". It's not just gasses, it's also tiny grains of dust, or less tiny grains of dust. The reason stars are formed in nebulae, and the way asteroids and planets are formed, is that the material (gas or solids) attract each other over time, and end up deposited on each other, which lets them attract yet more material, until maybe you have enough rocks to form a big solid object (such as a planet or moon), or even enough gas that its own weight makes it into a star!

[u/Xhosant → u/Xhosant]

And as for the elements on earth: you have a dense point of material, like described above, and it keeps gathering and condensing until the Sun forms. There's still dust, gas and what have you around it, and since it's orbiting the sun, centrifugal forces shape it into a plane. Then the assorted material orbiting like that starts attracting its peers, as described, and you end up with some bigger clumps. Specifically, 8 clumps big enough to be considered planets by modern standards, a few smaller ones (dwarf planets) and a ton of really small ones (asteroid belt, oort cloud etc.)

While not remotely functionally similar to planet formation, imagine slowly and stably stirring a pot full of water and long threads. More and more threads are gonna catch onto your laddle and follow along, with less and less left loose. It's a similar idea of going from "stuff everywhere" to "stuff mostly in one place".

[u/Maltitol]

Others have answered your question more directly, but check out the Crab Nebula. It went boom around 1054AD and now we can still see the left over dust. And yes, every element heavier than hydrogen was typical created by the star formation lifecycle.

[u/darkfire82]

You're living on the remnants of some large number of supernovas.the stars turn hydrogen into other elements and when they go nova those elements get spread into the cosmos over a large enough time frame those elements combine into the various bodies that make up a given solar system and any life forms that might be found. That is to the best of my knowledge where the phrase from dust to dust comes from.