CaltechAUTHORS
Published December 13, 2013 | Version Supplemental Material + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Phosphorus in the Young Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Seoul National University
  • 2. ROR icon University of Toronto
  • 3. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 4. ROR icon Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute
  • 5. ROR icon Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Abstract

Phosphorus (^(31)P), which is essential for life, is thought to be synthesized in massive stars and dispersed into interstellar space when these stars explode as supernovae (SNe). Here, we report on near-infrared spectroscopic observations of the young SN remnant Cassiopeia A, which show that the abundance ratio of phosphorus to the major nucleosynthetic product iron (^(56)Fe) in SN material is up to 100 times the average ratio of the Milky Way, confirming that phosphorus is produced in SNe. The observed range is compatible with predictions from SN nucleosynthetic models but not with the scenario in which the chemical elements in the inner SN layers are completely mixed by hydrodynamic instabilities during the explosion.

Additional Information

© 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received for publication 26 July 2013. Accepted for publication 7 November 2013. This work was supported by Basic Science Research (NRF-2011-0007223) and International Cooperation in Science and Technology (NRF-2010-616-C00020) programs through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, and also by the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies (KOFST). D.-S.M. acknowledges support from the the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We thank M. Muno for his help in observations and J.-J. Lee for providing the Chandra 1Ms x-ray images.

Attached Files

Submitted - 1312.3807v1.pdf

Supplemental Material - Koo-SM.pdf

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1312.3807v1.pdf

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
43273
DOI
10.1126/science.1243823
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20140108-140548194

Related works

Describes
http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.3807 (URL)

Funding

National Research Foundation of Korea
NRF-2011-0007223
National Research Foundation of Korea
NRF-2010-616-C00020
Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Korea)
Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies (KOFST)
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)

Dates

Created
2014-01-15
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-10
Created from EPrint's last_modified field