Quote:Traces of rare forms of iron and plutonium have been found at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, after some kind of cataclysm in outer space created this radioactive stuff and sent it raining down on our planet.
The extraterrestrial debris arrived on Earth within the last 10 million years, according to a report in the journal Science. Once it hit the Pacific Ocean and settled to the bottom, nearly a mile down, the material got incorporated into layers of a rock that was later hauled up by a Japanese oil exploration company and donated to researchers.
"Just knowing that there's plutonium there is amazing," says Brian Fields, an astronomer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was not part of the research team. "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."
Freshly made specimens like these could help scientists understand how the universe forged elements heavier than iron, such as gold, platinum, uranium and plutonium. "These are the elements where we are still in a mystery," says Anton Wallner, a physicist with the Australian National University in Canberra who led the international team that did the new work. "We do not know exactly where they are produced and how much is produced in different sites."
Figuring out the source of these elements is a big deal for astronomers, who already pretty much know where the rest of the periodic table comes from. Hydrogen and helium got born in the Big Bang, for example, and elements such as carbon and oxygen form in the cores of stars — that's why beloved astronomer Carl Sagan liked to say, "We are made of star stuff."
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996499035...cean-floor
I just think it's amazing that they can detect just a few hundred atoms of anything at all.
On hiatus.
