Mathematics – Logic
Scientific paper
Jul 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007psrd.repte.118t&link_type=abstract
Planetary Science Research Discoveries
Mathematics
Logic
Iron-60, Nickel-60, Planetesimals, Isotope, Sun
Scientific paper
Astronomic observations with the latest and greatest telescopes are leading astronomers to embrace the idea that stars usually form in clusters, even if they end up, like our Sun, isolated from other stars. Cosmochemists using optical microscopes, electron microscopes, and mass spectrometers are finding evidence supporting the idea, along with important details about the star-forming regions and about the earliest history of the Solar System. The latest breakthrough is reported by Martin Bizzarro and his colleagues at the Geological Institute and Geological Museum in Denmark, at the University of Texas, and at Clemson University in South Carolina. They made high-precision measurements of iron and nickel isotopes. The results show that the oldest planetesimals to form in the solar system did not contain any iron-60, which decays to nickel-60 with a half-life of only 1.5 million years, yet somewhat younger materials did contain it. In contrast, aluminum-26, with a half-life of 740,000 years, was relatively uniformly distributed.
This suggests to Bizzarro and his colleagues that iron-60 was added to the cloud of gas and dust surrounding the primitive Sun (the protoplanetary disk) about 1 million years after the Solar System formed. This could happen if the Sun's nursery contained massive stars (perhaps 30 times the mass of the Sun). Such stars last only about 4 million years. They are extremely active, blowing away their outer layers in the last million years of existence. The dispersed material would have included aluminum-26 and might have caused collapse of interstellar gas and dust to cause formation of the Sun and its protoplanetary disk. A million years later the massive star exploded, ejecting iron-60 from its interior. Bizzarro and colleagues argue that this huge event of destruction and creation is recorded in the meteorites.
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