Posted on Thursday, January 09, 2014
For a long while dust in galaxies has been a distracting obstacle to reaching further in observations, even the size of our own Milky Way galaxy was first thought to be smaller as astronomers didn't know yet how much dust there is in the Galaxy.
But how does the dust form?
The main producer of dust is thought to be supernovae - huge explosions in which certain types of stars end their lives and spew out heavier elements than iron. And that is where dust has been thought to form, however there hasn't been much of observational evidence that it would be so.
But things are about to change.
The Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array has captured an image of a recent supernovae, that also shows signs of large amounts of dust, that has formed recently. The scientists observed Supernovae 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is the closest supernovae explosion that has been occurred in more than 400 years.
You can find out more about it here.
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