Supernova Dust in the Laboratory

Abstract: 

Primitive extraterrestrial materials like meteorites and cometary dust contain rare and tiny grains of presolar stardust – dust that condensed in the outflows and explosions of previous generations of stars and were part of the original building blocks of our Solar System. A wide variety of phases (for example, silicates, oxides, carbides, nitrides) have been found and they are identified by extremely unusual isotopic signatures reflecting nuclear processes that occurred in their parent stars. This talk will focus on the subset of presolar grains that are inferred to have originated in ancient supernovae (explosions of stars more than about ten times the mass of the Sun). Supernovae are the nucleosynthetic sources for a large fraction of the elements in the periodic table and are believed to have been the most important source of dust in the early Universe. Supernova stardust grains provide an atomic snapshot of their formation conditions that can be decoded in modern microanalytical laboratories and thus provide information unobtainable by other means.

I will discuss how we identify supernova grains and give examples of how they can be used to glean new information about the physics and chemistry of these cosmic explosions.
 

Bio: 

Cosmochemist Larry Nittler studies the origin and evolution of stars, the galaxy, and the solar system, both through laboratory analysis of extraterrestrial materials like meteorites and returned comet and asteroid samples and through planetary remote sensing via spacecraft.  He has played leading roles in the analysis of comet and solar wind samples returned by NASA’s Stardust and Genesis missions, respectively, and served as deputy principal investigator on NASA’s MESSENGER mission to Mercury. He is currently a NASA Participating Scientist on the Japanese asteroid sample-return mission, Hayabusa2 and a member of the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo Mercury mission team. He received the Alfred O. Nier prize of the Meteoritical Society in 2001 and was named a fellow of the same society in 2010. Asteroid 5992 Nittler is named in his honor.

Learn More: 

• View Larry's ASU faculty webpage: https://search.asu.edu/profile/4084680
• Read article, "ASU scientist uses NASA MESSENGER mission data to measure chromium on Mercury": https://news.asu.edu/20230707-scientists-use-nasa-messenger-mission-data-measure-chromium-mercury
• Watch video,"Larry Nittler, A Trip to the Early Solar System, September 7, 2022": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVg0t-1OVQI
• Discover more on supernova stardust grains:
  • https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017hsn..book.2473H/abstract
  • https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-024-01122-w