Niobium’s Ghosts Unravels The Mysteries Of Our Solar System
Analyzing the radioactive isotope niobium-92 tells us that the inner part of our Solar system comes from an ancient Ia-type supernova while the outer parts come from a supernova that used to be a massive star.
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Niobium-92 is the most stable of the unstable isotopes of this particular transition metal. Its half-life is 34.7 million years. And while from a human's perspective this is a very long time in geological and universal terms this is just a blink of an eye. Since our Solar system started existing it has gone essentially extinct but there are still some “ghosts” of niobium-92 in the form of a stable isotope called zirconium-92.
Maria Schönbächler from the ETH Zürich and an international team managed to substantially enhance our capabilities of dating niobium-92 -> zirconium-92 and used it to research the early times of the Solar system. The key to that were minerals with zirconium and rutile that the scientists got from meteorites coming from the asteroid Vesta which is considered to be the only known rocky protoplanet that is still around from the times when the Solar system was young.
The minerals are the best for niobium-92 analysis. The researchers used uranium –> lead dating to calculate how common was niobium-92 when the Solar system was created while at the same time creating the better niobium-92 -> zirconium-92 dating.
With their enhanced dating technologies the scientists created a model of the Solar system’s creation. According to this model, the inner part of the Solar system with its terrestrial planets was majorly created from material that was ejected into the Universe with an Ia-type supernova. This type of supernova is a binary star where one of the stars is a white dwarf that steals material from its companion. And when its mass of the white dwarf reaches a certain critical mass it explodes as a supernova.
On the other hand, the outer part of the Solar system with its gas giants was mostly created from material that was thrown into the Universe during a supernova explosion caused by a massive star collapsing. Most likely it happened in an ancient stellar nursery where our Sun was born as well. So with two supernovae in its history, we can certainly call it an explosive history.
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