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Was the Solar System born through a neutron star-neutron star merger?
http://astronomynow.com/2015/12/09/g...eavy-elements/
Heavy elements present at the dawn of the Solar System were produced by a nearby merger of two neutron stars, which unleashed a powerful gamma-ray burst, according to astronomers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Writing in the journal Nature Physics, Dr Kenta Hotokezaka, Professor Tsvi Piran and Professor Michael Paul show how a significant quantity of plutonium-244 found its way into the early Solar System following the neutron star merger. None of this plutonium-244 remains in the Solar System today, some four-and-a-half billion years later, but its presence can be inferred. With a half-life of only 80 million years, the plutonium-244 quickly decayed into more stable, daughter isotopes of elements such as xeon, which can be found today in meteorites. I remember reading some years back that there's a mystery about the elements that make up the Solar System. Namely that it's possible that two different types of supernovas were needed to seed our stellar nebula when we were forming. That's because the types of elements we were seeing couldn't come from only one type of supernova. Now it looks like they're saying that not only did two different supernova happened in close vicinity to each other, but then their neutron star remnants spiralled into each other to form a black hole, which released still more unusual elements! The chances of that happening are astronomical! I guess it's a good thing that these are astronomical phenomena then. Yousuf Khan |
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