Future Radioisotope Measurements To Clarify The Origin Of Deep-ocean 244Pu

244Pu has been discovered in deep-ocean deposits spanning the past 10 Myr, a period that includes two 60Fe pulses from nearby supernovae.

244Pu is among the heaviest r-process products, and we consider whether the 244Pu was created in the supernovae, which is disfavored by model calculations, or in an earlier kilonova that seeded 244Pu in the nearby interstellar medium, which was subsequently swept up by the supernova debris.

We propose probing these possibilities by measuring other r-process radioisotopes such as 129I and 182Hf in deep-ocean deposits and in lunar regolith.

Xilu Wang, Adam M. Clark, John Ellis, Adrienne F. Ertel, Brian D. Fields, Brian J. Fry, Zhenghai Liu, Jesse A. Miller, Rebecca Surman

Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, comments welcome
Subjects: High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE); High Energy Physics – Phenomenology (hep-ph); Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex); Nuclear Theory (nucl-th); Geophysics (physics.geo-ph)
Report number: KCL-PH-TH/2021-91, CERN-TH-2021-208, N3AS-21-017
Cite as: arXiv:2112.09607 [astro-ph.HE] (or arXiv:2112.09607v1 [astro-ph.HE] for this version)
Submission history
From: Xilu Wang
[v1] Fri, 17 Dec 2021 16:31:55 UTC (282 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.09607
Astrobiology, Astrochemistry, Supernova