Popular MechanicsScientists Just Pinpointed Some of the Missing Elements of Life on EarthDarren Orf
Thu, December 11, 2025 at 2:30 PM EST
4 min read
Scientists Found Some of Life’s Missing Elements Eugene Mymrin - Getty ImagesHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
*Scientists have long been probing the universe to determine how elements came together to form planets and (at least in Earth’s case) gave rise to life.
*One disconnect was that the universe contained higher levels of elements like chlorine and potassium that could be observed in stars and supernovae alone.
*Using the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM, space telescope, scientists have found the faint emission lines that explain some of these discrepancies in the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant, proving once again how central these extreme explosion are for the creation of the universe as we know it.
Understanding the reality of our existence is, in some ways, the ultimate goal of the entire scientific endeavor. That question, though, comes with many different answers, each pursued by their own respective scientific fields. Biologists investigate how single-celled organisms eventually evolved into humans, physicists probe the depths of our reality at the quantum level, and neuroscientists try to work out the intricate array of neurons and synapses that somehow give rise to subjective consciousness.
Astrophysicists, on the other hand, explore the beginning of everything—the formation of the universe, the galaxy, the Sun, and (eventually) our very planet itself. When it comes to habitable planetary formation, scientists can easily trace elements like oxygen, carbon, and neon to a particular era of a star’s life.
However, other essential elements to planetary formation and life on Earth—particularly chlorine and potassium—are harder to pinpoint. That’s because due to their atomic structure (both are odd-z elements, meaning they contain an odd number of protons), their emission lines are more faint in X-ray analysis. And of the entire amount of these elements found throughout the universe, only one-tenth is produced in stars. We’re missing lots of data on these crucial elements.
Luckily, NASA’s X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM (pronounced “crism”), which was originally launched in September of 2023, has just the suite of tools to investigate this mystery. And as detailed in a new study
published by the XRISM collaboration in the journal Nature Astronomy, the team trained its next-gen X-ray space telescope toward a famous supernova remnant, Cassiopeia A (Cas A). In that stellar wreckage, located 11,000 light-years away from Earth, they discovered an elemental goldmine—an abundance of elements hidden from past observations.
“Stars appear to shimmer quietly in the night sky, but they actively forge materials that form planets and enable life as we know it,” Toshiki Sato, an astrophysicist at Meiji University in Tokyo and co-author of the study, said in a NASA press statement. “Now, thanks to XRISM, we have a better idea of when and how stars might make crucial, yet harder-to-find, elements.”
According to NASA, previous explorations of Cas A using the Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered traces of iron, silicon, sulfur, and other elements, but not potassium and chlorine—at least, not in the abundances needed to explain the formation of planets and life itself. To take a closer look, scientists relied on the Resolve instrument onboard XRISM, which contains a microcalorimeter capable of providing resolutions orders of magnitude higher than previous X-ray detectors (the video above explains how it works).
With this increased resolution, the faint lines produced by odd-Z elements came into full view. They also discovered that these elements were largely clustered in the southeast and northern parts of the remnant, potentially hinting that the star contained asymmetries before it exploded.
“Being able to make measurements with good statistical precision of these rarer elements really helps us understand the nuclear fusion that goes on in stars before and during supernovae,” Paul Plucinsky, a co-author of the study from Harvard, said in a NASA press release. “We suspected a key part might be asymmetry, and now we have more evidence that’s the case. But there’s still a lot we just don’t understand about how stars explode and distribute all these elements across the cosmos.”
As is often the case, when one mystery related to our cosmic origins is solved, another quickly takes its place.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/scientists-just-pinpointed-missing-elements-193000645.html
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