Publikationsrepositorium - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) provides the highest sensitivity for measurements of long-lived radionuclides with half-lives in the order of million years. We will apply this method to search for live supernova (SN)-produced radionuclides on Earth.
An indication to recent SN activity in our solar neighborhood is the existence of a thin, hot cavity in the local interstellar medium, embedding our solar system. This so called superbubble, the Local Bubble, was produced by multiple SN explosions, starting ~14 Myr ago. Nuclides, which are synthesized in massive stars and during their explosions, are then entrained in the SN shell and may be transported to the solar system, if such an event happens within a short distance.
Two deep-sea sediment cores originating from the Indian Ocean have been selected to search for the SN-produced radionuclides ²⁶Al, ⁵³Mn, ⁶⁰Fe and ²⁴⁴Pu in the time range of 2-3 Myr. We aim to measure these isotopes at different laboratories with high time resolution with the goal to confirm a previously found SN signal in a ferromanganese crust from the Pacific Ocean.