The
lead surrounding the stars — which was part of the original cloud of gas and
dust from which these stars formed, not
generated by reactions in the evolving stars themselves — may be dispersed within an atmospheric layer as much as 100 kilometers thick (depicted patchily in pink) that altogether weighs up to 100 billion metric tons.
«Our study confirms that the
dust is there, and that we can use it to determine how much energy was
generated in the destruction of the star,» Varoujan Gorjian, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, who was part of the study
led by van Velzen, said in the statement.