plutonium-244 tagged posts

The first-ever discovery of an extraterrestrial radioactive isotope on Earth has scientists rethinking the origins of the elements on our planet.

The tiny traces of plutonium-244 were found in ocean crust alongside radioactive iron-60. The two isotopes are evidence of violent cosmic events in the vicinity of Earth millions of years ago.

Star explosions, or supernovae create many of the heavy elements in the periodic table, including those vital for human life, such as iron, potassium and iodine.

To form even heavier elements, such as gold, uranium and plutonium it was thought that a more violent event ma...

Neutron star. Credit: NASA

A team of scientists from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests a solution to the Galactic radioactive plutonium puzzle. All the Plutonium used on Earth is artificially produced in nuclear reactors. Still, it turns out that it is also produced in nature. “The origin of heavy elements produced in nature through rapid neutron capture (‘r-process’) by seed nuclei is one of the current nucleosynthesis mysteries,” Dr Hotokezaka, Prof Piran and Prof Paul from the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem said in their letter. Plutonium is a radioactive element. Its longest-lived isotope is plutonium-244 with a lifetime of 120 million years.

Detection of plutonium-244 in nature would imply that the element was synthesized in astrophysical ph...