Life's Building Blocks Can Survive a Supernova

June 13th, 2007del.icio.us Digg Reddit StumbleUpon

Life's Building Blocks Can Survive a Supernova

Here's a cool photograph of supernova remnant N132D. It's actually a composite image, made up of pictures gathered by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The remnant is located approximately 163,000 light-years away in the neighbouring galaxy: the Large Magellanic Cloud.

An interesting discovery in this research is that one of life's building blocks, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), seem to survive the supernova explosion. These carbon and hydrogen compounds are true space survivors; they're found in comets, in star-forming regions and planetary disks, and now… in supernovae.