The Moon Hides a Scrambled Record of 100M Years of Supernovae. Researchers Just Unscrambled It.
A new study in the journal Physical Review Letters claims to have deciphered an almost unimaginably complex scrambling of Moon dust, allowing the researchers to look much further back into the history of stellar explosions than ever before.
Scientists have long known that layers of sediment at the bottom of the ocean can contain evidence of historical supernovae around the galaxy. It comes down to a number of marker substances, but most notably, the iron isotope 60-Fe.
60-Fe is produced almost exclusively in massive stars and their supernovae, and has no known way to form on Earth; if you find it here, it must have arrived from a supernova elsewhere.
The only problem is that the ocean floor has been mixed up by various events, especially back when it wasn't ocean floor at all, which complicates the dating process. Since deeper samples aren't always oldersamples, scientists also need a...
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