Enlarge / Artist's conception of the early Solar System, which was at risk of a nearby supernova. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Stars are thought to form within enormous filaments of molecular gas. Regions where one or more of these filaments meet, known as hubs, are where massive stars form.

These massive stars, located nearby, would have put the early Solar System at risk of a powerful supernova. This risk is more than just hypothetical; a research team at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, led by astrophysicist Doris Arzoumanian, looked at isotopes found in ancient meteorites, finding possible evidence of a massive star’s turbulent death.

So why did the Solar System survive? The gas within the filament seems to be able to protect it from the supernova and its onslaught of radioactive isotopes. “The host filament can shield the young Solar System from stellar feedback, both during the formation and evolution of stars (stellar outflow, wind, and radiation) and at the end of their lives (supernovae),” Arzoumanian and her team said in a study recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Enlarge / The tattered shell of the first recorded supernova (SN185) was captured by the Dark Energy Camera. This image covers an impressive 45 arcminutes in the sky—a rare view of the entirety of this supernova remnant. (credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF)

In early December 185 CE, Chinese astronomers recorded a bright "guest star" in the night sky that shone for eight months in the direction of Alpha Centauri before fading away—most likely the earliest recorded supernova in the historical record. The image above gives us a rare glimpse of the entire tattered remnant of that long-ago explosion, as captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Andes in Chile. DECam has been operating since 2012, and while it was originally designed to be part of the ongoing Dark Energy Survey, it's also available for other astronomers to use in their research. This new wide-view perspective of the remains of SN185 should help astronomers learn even more about stellar evolution.

As we've written previously, there are two types of known supernovas, depending on the mass of the original star. An iron-core collapse supernova occurs with massive stars (greater than 10 solar masses), which collapse so violently that it causes a huge, catastrophic explosion. The temperatures and pressures become so high that the carbon in the star's core fuses. This halts the core's collapse, at least temporarily, and this process continues, over and over, with progressively heavier atomic nuclei. When the fuel finally runs out entirely, the (by then) iron core collapses into a black hole or a neutron star.

Then there is a Type Ia supernova. Smaller stars (up to about eight solar masses) gradually cool to become dense cores of ash known as white dwarfs. If a white dwarf that has run out of nuclear fuel is part of a binary system, it can siphon off matter from its partner, adding to its mass until its core reaches high enough temperatures for carbon fusion to occur. These are the brightest supernovae, and they also shine with a remarkably consistent peak luminosity, making them invaluable "standard candles" for astronomers to determine cosmic distances.