A rare isotope, iron-60 has been detected in multiple locations in the last few years suggesting to scientists that the earth may either be moving through a Local Interstellar Cloud or coming into contact with isotopes that were released after an ancient supernova.
The research was published on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and offers insights that the earth is travelling currently a local interstellar cloud due to the Iron-60 isotopes being recorded. The isotope has become a point of focus in the last few years, with scientists indicating that any deposits found on others must have come from somewhere else due to the time the isotope takes to decay.
The earth formation was over 4.6 billion years ago and even if at that time the iron-60 isotope had been available, it could not have survived to the present day. The isotope has a half-life of 2.6 million years, and therefore, it would have only taken 15 million it would have completely decayed and disappeared, further proving that any deposit on earth must have come from somewhere else.
Local Interstellar Cloud
Scientists such as Nuclear physicist Anton Wallner have discovered that some iron-60 isotopes fell to earth millions of years ago. Wallner was able to find isotopes that were at least 2.6 million years in the sea bed, proving that ancient supernova debris might have rained on the earth, leaving behind the isotopes.
However, in recent times, scientists have also found that the isotope has been raining down on earth within the last 20 years. Scientists also announced a few years ago that the iron-60 isotope was also found on the earth’s atmosphere by NASA’s space-based Advanced Composition Explorer.
What this data suggested is that the isotope found by Wallner that dated back 2.6 million and 6 million years ago may have come from an ancient supernova, that formed a cloud with some deposits of the isotope. The earth has now entered and moving the region with fragments of the supernova. This region was referred to as the Local Interstellar Cloud.
This cloud was now contributing to the faint traces of the iron-60 isotope that was being detected on the earth’s atmosphere. However, scientists were also quick to indicate that Local Interstellar Cloud and the supernova debris are coincident rather than a singular structure meaning that the debris remained in the interstellar after a supernova occurred millions of years ago.
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