Chemical enrichment of the pre-solar cloud by supernova dust grains

Abstract

The presence of short-lived radioisotopes (SLRs) in solar system meteorites has been interpreted as evidence that the solar system was exposed to a supernova shortly before or during its formation. Yet results from hydrodynamical models of SLR injection into the proto-solar cloud or disc suggest that gas-phase mixing may not be efficient enough to reproduce the observed abundances. As an alternative, we explore the injection of SLRs via dust grains as a way to overcome the mixing barrier. We numerically model the interaction of a supernova remnant containing SLR-rich dust grains with a nearby molecular cloud. The dust grains are subject to drag forces and both thermal and non-thermal sputtering. We confirm that the expanding gas shell stalls upon impact with the dense cloud and that gas-phase SLR injection occurs slowly due to hydrodynamical instabilities at the cloud surface. In contrast, dust grains of sufficient size (> 1 micron) decouple from the gas and penetrate into the cloud within 0.1 Myr. Once inside the cloud, the dust grains are destroyed by sputtering, releasing SLRs and rapidly enriching the dense (potentially star-forming) regions. Our results suggest that SLR transport on dust grains is a viable mechanism to explain SLR enrichment.

15 pages, 10 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Movies can be found here: http://user.physics.unc.edu/~mdgood86/research.html

References in corpus (21)

• Athena: A New Code for Astrophysical MHD
• Nucleosynthesis and Remnants in Massive Stars of Solar Metallicity
• The nucleosynthesis of Al26 and Fe60 in solar metallicity stars extending in mass from 11 to 120 Msun: the hydrostatic and explosive contributions
• Momentum Injection by Supernovae in the Interstellar Medium
• Dust Formation and Survival in Supernova Ejecta
• Asymmetries in core-collapse supernovae from maps of radioactive ${}^{44}$Ti in CassiopeiaA
• Three-Dimensional Simulations of Core-Collapse Supernovae: From Shock Revival to Shock Breakout
• Abundance, distribution, and origin of 60Fe in the solar protoplanetary disk
• A stubbornly large mass of cold dust in the ejecta of Supernova 1987A
• Dust Destruction in the High-Velocity Shocks Driven by Supernovae in the Early Universe
• Condensation of dust in the ejecta of type II-P supernovae
• Solar system genealogy revealed by extinct short-lived radionuclides in meteorites
• The Magnetohydrodynamics of Shock-Cloud Interaction in Three Dimensions
• Cassiopeia A: dust factory revealed via submillimetre polarimetry
• The turbulent destruction of clouds - I. A k-epsilon treatment of turbulence in 2D models of adiabatic shock-cloud interactions
• Radioactive Probes of the Supernova-Contaminated Solar Nebula: Evidence that the Sun was Born in a Cluster
• Inheritance of solar short- and long-lived radionuclides from molecular clouds and the unexceptional nature of the solar system
• Simultaneous Triggered Collapse of the Presolar Dense Cloud Core and Injection of Short-Lived Radioisotopes by a Supernova Shock Wave
• Injection of Short-Lived Radionuclides into the Early Solar System from a Faint Supernova with Mixing-Fallback
• Supernova Propagation And Cloud Enrichment: A new model for the origin of ${}^{60}$Fe in the early solar system
• Triggering Collapse of the Presolar Dense Cloud Core and Injecting Short-Lived Radioisotopes with a Shock Wave. III. Rotating Three Dimensional Cloud Cores

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Solar structure and evolution
• Triggered Star Formation Inside the Shell of a Wolf-Rayet Bubble as the origin of the Solar System
• Supernova induced processing of interstellar dust: impact of ISM gas density and gas turbulence
• Cradle(s) of the Sun
• Mass, Morphing, Metallicities: The Evolution of Infalling High Velocity Clouds
• Triggering Collapse of the Presolar Dense Cloud Core and Injecting Short-Lived Radioisotopes with a Shock Wave. V. Nonisothermal Collapse Regime
• Timescales of Solar System Formation Based on Al-Ti Isotope Correlation by Supernova Ejecta
• A systematic comparison of two-equation RANS turbulence models applied to shock-cloud interactions