Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Making Up Perseus
Supernovae
explosions are largely responsible for enriching the Universe with chemical elements more complex than hydrogen and
helium. These violent explosions distribute chemical elements into the
interstellar environment (and cook up new elements in the process). And the
process does not end with the stellar explosion: mergers of neutron stars, left
behind by the explosion of massive starss, can produce
high atomic number elements like gold. But how does this process work
throughout the Universe, and how does the composition of the Universe compare with
the composition of our solar system? To help find out, the Hitomi X-ray Observatory
made a high-priority observation of the Perseus
Cluster, a cluster of galaxies relatively close to the Local Group (to which
the Milky Way belongs). The galaxies in the Perseus Cluster orbit through hot,
X-ray producing gas, generated by supernova of stars in the member galaxies, and
other energetic processes. Hitomi carried a revolutionary new type of instrument, the
Soft
X-ray Spectrometer (SXS), an X-ray "calorimeter" which measures extremely
precise variations of X-ray emission with wavelength by detecting tiny changes
in the detector temperature when an X-ray is absorbed by it. The image above is
a montage summarizing this new Hitomi result. The inset image on the upper right
shows an X-ray image of the hot gas in the Perseus cluster taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, with the Hitomi
Soft X-ray Spectrometer fields outlined in blue. The upper graph shows the X-ray
emission spectrum of the hot gas in Perseus as seen by the SXS. The spikes in
the spectrum are X-ray emission produced by ionized atoms within
the hot cluster gas. Two wavelength regions of this emission are highlighted in the lower
graphs. The spectrum on the left features emission from chromium, manganese, and
iron; on the right, iron and nickel. Careful analysis shows that the abundances
of these elements are very similar to the abundances of these elements near the Sun,
showing the surprising result that both regions experienced a similar chemical
enrichment during their very different histories.
Published: December 11, 2017
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Page Author: Dr. Michael F. Corcoran
Last modified Monday, 26-Feb-2024 17:36:01 EST