Thanks to NASA telescopes, scientists have been able to learn more about how Cassiopeia A, a star that was over eight times the mass, exploded in in a "fiery death," known as a supernova.
The NuSTAR space telescope array is the first device to map the radioactive material from a supernova explosion.
"Until we had NuSTAR, we couldn't see down to the core of the explosion," Brian Grefenstette, lead author and research scientist at the California Institute of Technology, said according to CNN.
Results were published this week in the journal Nature.
NuSTAR's research of Cassiopeia A showed the distribution and location of radioactive titanium-44, an "unstable" isotope with a lifespan of just 60 years. The supernova explosion's light arrived on Earth about 350 years ago, but there are still a lot of titanium-44 to be studied.
NuSTAR stands for Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, and launched in June 2012. It's equipped with two telescopes, according to CNN.
There's no set procedure for how the explosion process works however, Grefenstette said. Scientists still want to conduct more research to learn more, especially since the components of Earth came from a supernova that exploded 5 billion years ago.
"People should care about supernova explosions because that's where all the stuff that makes us comes from," Grefenstette said to CNN. "All of the iron in your blood and calcium in your bones and teeth, and gold in your wedding band, that all comes from the center of a supernova explosion."
The current theory is at the center of a supernova, an "intense amount of pressure" builds up, neutrinos and tiny particles are then produced, which heats up the gas in the center, according to CNN.
"What you get is just like when you're boiling water on your stove top: You get hot bubbles at the bottom that try to rise up through the cold material above it, and the whole thing starts to slosh around," Grefenstette said.
Gigantic bubbles are formed during this process, and then the entire thing starts to "fall apart," according to Grefenstette.
"It's like blowing the top off a pressure cooker, and the shock wave rips apart the star," Grefenstette said according to CNN.
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