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Aug. 21 (UPI) – Australian scientists found stardust in freshly melted snow from Antarctica, discovering large amounts of a rare isotope not natively found on Earth.
The researchers ruled out the chance that iron-60 was found in the journal of the world by the journal Physical Review Letters, it was delivered to Earth by some type of interstellar falling rock.
While Earth's most abundant element is iron, iron-60 has more neutrons than the well-known element. Scientists say that iron-60 can be found in the earth's crust, but the source is not as new as it was in snow that has accumulated in recent decades.
Bernhard Peucker-Ehrenbrink, a geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said in a press release. "You're essentially counting individual atoms."
Researchers melted about 1,100 pounds of snow from Antarctica, examining what was left behind.
They are also known to be the creators of iron and steel, and they have been found to be small in size, and to study other isotopes to determine if iron-60 was generated by cosmic rays meteorites.
Interstellar meteorites are rare, according to Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard, but "the smaller the object size is, the more abundant it is."
With this in mind, the researcher must be a supernova, "not so near as to kill us, but not too far to be diluted in space," said lead researcher Dominik Koll, a physicist at Australian National University.
Koll said that, in this case, the particles have been picked up by the local interstellar cloud, a 30-light-year-wide region of our solar system is currently passing through.
More reaching is understandable to understand where and when to iron-60 got to Earth – it has a half-life of 2.6 million years – which is more important .
"This is the first evidence that someone saw something new," Koll said.
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