Its name may not mean anything to you, but the Hypatia stone has fascinated and intrigued the scientific community for decades. Today, new analyzes lift the veil on the origins of this “extraterrestrial” fragment.
In December 1996, the Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat discovered a funny little pebble in the Sahara desert (Egypt). The latter was far from imagining that this black stone of regarding thirty grams – called Hypatia – was regarding to shake up the scientific community.
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Photo credit: Istock
An alien fragment
You may not know it, but Hypatia is composed of chemical properties never observed until now on Earth, specifies the magazine Maxisciences. Unsurprisingly, researchers have tried to uncover the origins of this “extraterrestrial” fragment.
Recently, scientists conducted a new study that might change everything. Indeed, the chemical analyzes revealed that the stone was probably the result of an explosion of a star in type Ia supernova, explains the specialized site Geo.
Photo credit: Romano Serra
A type la (or thermonuclear) supernova is a gigantic explosion that causes the disappearance of a star. And the least we can say is that this phenomenon is extremely rare in the Milky Way.
According to the scientists’ hypothesis, a red giant star was regarding to be destroyed before transforming into a white dwarf, a very dense star which has exhausted its nuclear fuel and which “ejects its upper layers as a planetary nebula”remember Futura Sciences.
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As a result of this transformation, the remnant of the star would have become one with another star before sucking it in. In fact, it would have exploded in a supernova because it had become too heavy.
Finally, the atoms of gas that remained from the supernova would have clumped together with the particles of a cloud of dust before solidifying into a compact body for millions of years, underlines SciTechDaily.
“In a way, you might say you caught a supernova Ia explosion in action, because the gas atoms from that explosion got caught in the surrounding dust cloud, which eventually formed the parent body of Hypatia”says Jan Kramers, one of the authors of the study, on the website of the University of Johannesburg.
The Hypatia fragment belongs to the body that would have struck present-day Egypt.
Photo credit: Romano Serra
