Fingering the culprit that polluted the Solar System
Thursday, August 2, 2012 - 14:01
in Astronomy & Space
For decades it has been thought that a shock wave from a supernova explosion triggered the formation of our Solar System. The shock wave also injected material from the exploding star into a cloud of dust and gas, and the newly polluted cloud collapsed to form the Sun and its surrounding planets. New work provides the first fully three-dimensional models for how this process could have happened.