Astronomical Oxygen Isotopic Evidence for Supernova Enrichment of the Solar System Birth Environment by Propagating Star Formation

Creators: Young, Edward D.; Gounelle, Matthieu; Smith, Rachel L.; Morris, Mark R.; Pontoppidan, Klaus M.

Abstract

New infrared absorption measurements of oxygen isotope ratios in CO gas from individual young stellar objects confirm that the solar system is anomalously high in its [^(18)O]/[^(17)O] ratio compared with extrasolar oxygen in the Galaxy. We show that this difference in oxygen isotope ratios is best explained by ~1% enrichment of the protosolar molecular cloud by ejecta from Type II supernovae from a cluster having of order a few hundred stars that predated the Sun by at least 10-20 Myr. The likely source of exogenous oxygen was the explosion of one or more B stars during a process of propagating star formation.

Additional Information

© 2011 American Astronomical Society. Received 2009 September 8; accepted 2010 December 22; published 2011 February 8. This work is based on observations collected at the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope under program ID 179.C-0151. The authors acknowledge sponsorship from NASA's Origins Program (EDY, MRM), the NASA Astrobiology Institute (EDY, MRM), the Programme National de Planétologie (PNP), the CNRS fund France-États-Unis, and the European program ORIGINS (grant MRTN-CT-2006- 035519). K.M.P. was provided support by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant no. 1201.01 awarded by the Space Telescope Institute. The authors are indebted to Geoff Blake (Caltech) for access to the NIRSPEC data for IRAS 19110+1045 and to Bruce Elmegreen (IBM) for enlightening communications.

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