Mass spectrometry traces star dust
Iron-60 discovery in the Antarctic provides information on the environment of the solar system
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The rare isotope iron-60 is produced by huge star explosions. Only a small proportion comes from remote stars. Researchers have now discovered iron-60 in the Antarctic for the first time. The scientists suggest that the iron isotope comes from the interstellar neighborhood.The snow samples were collected at the Kohnen Station in Antarctica, then chemically processed in Garching, at the Atominstitut Wien and at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and finally analysed in the accelerator laboratory (https://www.mll-muenchen.de/) at Garching. The results were published in https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.072701 [more] |