60Fe tagged posts

Vast bubble in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way visible from the Southern Hemisphere, was formed by the explosive death of one or more of the cluster of massive stars inside the bubble. Cosmic rays reaching Earth are created and accelerated by similar explosions. Credit: Gemini South Telescope in Chile. Composite by Travis Rector of the University of Alaska Anchorage

Supernova exploded in our ‘galactic neighborhood’ within the last few million years Most of the cosmic rays arriving at Earth from our galaxy come from nearby clusters of massive stars, according to new observations from the Cosmic Ray Isotope Spectrometer (CRIS), an instrument aboard NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft...

Since the moon generally provides a better cosmic record than Earth, the scientists were also able to specify for the first time an upper limit for the flow of 60Fe that must have reached the moon. Credit: © SkyLine / Fotolia

Confirmation of supernova explosion in the neighborhood of our solar system. ~2 million yrs ago a star exploded in a supernova close to our solar system: Its traces can still be found today in the form of an iron isotope found on the ocean floor. Now scientists have found increased concentrations of this supernova-iron in lunar samples as well. They believe both discoveries to originate from the same stellar explosion.

Estimation of the local fluence of Fe60 on the Moon’s surface. The dashed curves represent two different integration scenarios.

Increased concentrat...