Scientists have found traces of plutonium that reached Earth from a distant supernova. The traces were believed to have landed at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The plutonium was extracted by a Japanese oil company and was given to scientists for research.
“Fresh-made” Plutonium
According to the study published in the journal Science, the samples are comparatively young compared to the rest of the cosmos. And since it’s fresh, examining it would allow researchers to learn how plutonium and other heavy elements are formed inside the stars.
“Just knowing that there’s plutonium there is amazing,” Brian Fields, an astronomer from the University of Illinois, told NPR. “Now we only have tiny amounts of material — after all, we’re talking about hundreds of atoms here. But we should be grateful for that, because they are freshly-made from exploding stars.”
This “freshly-made” plutonium is still several times older than the existence of humanity. The scientists calculated that the plutonium is around 10 million years old and landed on Earth “within the past few million years,” as per the Science paper.
Origins yet unknown
But now, after a long time staying beneath the ocean, the plutonium has reached the scientists who might finally figure out its origin. The cosmic origins of elements such as plutonium, gold, and platinum are yet to be known. Several scientists believe that a regular old supernova wouldn’t be powerful enough to create them.
Another theory suggests the plutonium comes out of unusually explosive dying stars or other powerful cosmic events. “We do not know exactly where they are produced and how much is produced in different sites,” study leader Anton Wallner told NPR.
Recently, an international team of researchers, led by Alice Booth of the Leiden University, Netherlands, found methanol-ijs inside the warm part of a planet-forming disk. It is believed that the methanol cannot be produced there and its origin could be cold gas clouds that form stars and disks. If this is a common phenomenon then it could help researchers understand more about planet formation. The findings will be published in Nature Astronomy.
