In a paper appearing Thursday in the journal Nature, MIT scientists are reporting evidence that suggests planets might be forming in the swirling disk of debris created from a violent supernova explosion. "The discovery is surprising because the dusty disk orbiting the pulsar, or dead star, resembles the cloud of dust from which Earth emerged," writes Alicia Chang of the Associated Press. "Scientists say the latest finding should shed light on how planetary systems form."
Here's the thing, with all due respect to the MIT scientists: UMR's Dr. Oliver Manuel has been saying this forever, or at least since the 1970s. That's when he started telling anyone who would listen -- and many have ignored him -- that the entire solar system was created in a supernova explosion. Now, perhaps, conventional science is catching up with Manuel's unconventional ideas.
In countless papers and at science conferences around the world, Manuel has argued his supernova theory (he has also suggested that the sun is largely made of iron left over from the supernova and is not a giant ball of hydrogen), but scientists have preferred to accept a more friendly theory, which went something like this: Everyone knows the solar system was created slowly in a big but gentle cloud of ambiguous interstellar dust.
Maybe they were wrong? Maybe Manuel is about to finally get his due? More and more it looks like our solar system did, indeed, grow up fast in a rough neighborhood. Of the latest evidence proposed by the MIT scientists, Charles Beichman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says, "This is more Chernobyl than Malibu." Well, fine. But Manuel could have told you that a long time ago.
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