Supernova conception: Chemical evidence from meteorites suggests that the explosion of a truly massive star triggered the formation of our Solar System.

Credit: NASA

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"Those models didn't work if the material was [more realistically] heated by compression and cooled by radiation, and this conundrum has left serious doubts in the community about whether a supernova shock started these events over four billion years ago or not," said co-author Harri Vanhala, of the National Centre for Earth and Space Science Education in Columbia, Maryland.

Vanhala found the negative result in his doctoral thesis work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in 1997.

"We started with a Little Bang"

However, with a much more detailed and refined model, the Carnegie team have now succeeded in finding a way that a realistic simulation of a supernova aftershock could have triggered the pre-solar cloud of dust to form our Solar System.

With their new model they found that after 100,000 years the pre-solar cloud was 1,000 times denser than before. After 160,000 years, the cloud centre had collapsed to become a million times denser, forming the proto-Sun.

The researchers found that in the model, the isotopes from the shock front were mixed into the proto-Sun in a manner consistent with their origin in a supernova.

"This is the first time a detailed model for a supernova triggering the formation of our Solar System has been shown to work," said Boss. "We started with a 'Little Bang' nine billion years after the Big Bang."