Institutskolloquium des IPP 2016

Ort: Greifswald

Global deposition of radioactive nuclides from the most recent near-Earth supernovae

Institutskolloquium
A two million year old signal of 60Fe was detected in several terrestrial deep-sea archives and in lunar samples. This long-lived isotope is not produced on Earth, however, it is generated in massive stars and ejected during supernova explosions. The recent injection of 60Fe into the solar system coincides with the formation of the Local Bubble - a large cavity in the interstellar medium produced by multiple supernovae - into which our solar system is embedded. The most likely sources are stellar explosions within a moving group that passed the solar neighborhood, and whose surviving members are now in the Sco-Cen association. We have traced the trajectories of the member stars back in time and calculated the most probable explosion sites of the perished stars. By determining their masses and explosion times, we found a sequence of supernovae starting 13 Myr ago. With analytical and numerical methods we modeled the Local Bubble and, as a consequence of its formation, the terrestrial 60Fe signature. Similar calculations with another long-lived radionuclide, 26Al, show only a marginal supernova-signal. Accelerator mass spectrometry measurements of 26Al within samples of four deep-sea sediment cores from the Indian Ocean confirm this result. The data decreases exponentially towards larger depths as expected from 26Al produced in the Earth's atmosphere, which hides a contribution from nearby supernovae. [mehr]
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