Search for: All records

Radioactive nuclei are the key to understanding the circumstances of the birth of our Sun because meteoritic analysis has proven that many of them were present at that time. Their origin, however, has been so far elusive. The ERC-CoG-2016 RADIOSTAR project is dedicated to investigating the production of radioactive nuclei by nuclear reactions inside stars, their evolution in the Milky Way Galaxy, and their presence in molecular clouds. So far, we have discovered that: (i) radioactive nuclei produced by slow (107Pd and 182Hf) and rapid (129I and 247Cm) neutron captures originated from stellar sources —asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars and compact binary mergers, respectively—within the galactic environment that predated the formation of the molecular cloud where the Sun was born; (ii) the time that elapsed from the birth of the cloud to the birth of the Sun was of the order of 107 years, and (iii) the abundances of the very short-lived nuclei 26Al, 36Cl, and 41Ca can be explained by massive star winds in single or binary systems, if these winds directly polluted the early Solar System. Our current and future work, as required to finalise the picture of the origin of radioactive nuclei in the Solar System, involves studying the possible origin of radioactive nuclei in the early Solar System from core-collapse supernovae, investigating the production of 107Pd in massive star winds, modelling the transport and mixing of radioactive nuclei in the galactic and molecular cloud medium, and calculating the galactic chemical evolution of 53Mn and 60Fe and of the p-process isotopes 92Nb and 146Sm. 

Abstract Analysis of inclusions in primitive meteorites reveals that several short-lived radionuclides (SLRs) with half-lives of 0.1–100 Myr existed in the early solar system (ESS). We investigate the ESS origin of¹⁰⁷Pd,¹³⁵Cs, and¹⁸²Hf, which are produced byslowneutron captures (thes-process) in asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. We modeled the Galactic abundances of these SLRs using theOMEGA+galactic chemical evolution (GCE) code and two sets of mass- and metallicity-dependent AGB nucleosynthesis yields (Monash and FRUITY). Depending on the ratio of the mean-lifeτof the SLR to the average length of time between the formations of AGB progenitorsγ, we calculate timescales relevant for the birth of the Sun. Ifτ/γ≳ 2, we predict self-consistent isolation times between 9 and 26 Myr by decaying the GCE predicted¹⁰⁷Pd/¹⁰⁸Pd,¹³⁵Cs/¹³³Cs, and¹⁸²Hf/¹⁸⁰Hf ratios to their respective ESS ratios. The predicted¹⁰⁷Pd/¹⁸²Hf ratio indicates that our GCE models are missing 9%–73% of¹⁰⁷Pd and¹⁰⁸Pd in the ESS. This missing component may have come from AGB stars of higher metallicity than those that contributed to the ESS in our GCE code. Ifτ/γ≲ 0.3, we calculate instead the time (T_LE) from the last nucleosynthesis event that added the SLRs into the presolar matter to the formation of the oldest solids in the ESS. For the 2M_⊙,Z= 0.01 Monash model we find a self-consistent solution ofT_LE= 25.5 Myr.