From Scientific American blogs: a fair use excerpt:
One of the most widely known and repeated astrophysical facts is that stars produce all the heavy elements that eventually make planets, shrubberies, and the likes of us. It’s absolutely true, but how exactly do they get those elements out into the universe to do all that?....
The problem is that we haven’t fully understood how stars perform this trick [of dispersing the elements]. The only tool they have at their disposal is the pressure of stellar photons – light flooding from the star can push and accelerate material away from it. However, getting this light to push against the gas of the stellar atmosphere efficiently enough to set it in motion has seemed difficult. One option is that the tiny grains of dust act like miniature solar sails, that in turn snowplough through the gas to accelerate it along in front of them. However this theory has had some gaps in it; figuring out the necessary combination of dust grain composition, size, and location of formation has been tricky....
We link to an illuminating answer above.
No comments:
Post a Comment