Any idea of the source?
“But accelerator mass spectrometry is so sensitive that it even allows us to calculate from our measurements that the star that exploded must have had around 11 to 25 times the size of the sun,” Korschinek added.
It was too far away to cause a mass extinction, but it likely did shower the Earth with cosmic rays. That likely affected the climate.
“However, this can lead to increased cloud formation,” says co-author Dr. Thomas Faestermann. “Perhaps there is a link to the Pleistocene epoch, the period of the Ice Ages, which began 2.6 million years ago.”
So while it may not have been ultra-calamitous for Earth, it did have an effect.
Some researchers think that the supernova explosion at that time did trigger at least a partial extinction, called the Pliocene marine megafauna extinction. They point to not only the presence of elevated levels of 60Fe, but also to a feature out in space called the Local Bubble. It’s a gigantic, cavernous hole in the interstellar medium caused by one or more supernovae explosions. Now, the discovery of 53Mn just strengthens that hypothesis.
The Megalodon, a bus-sized shark and one of the largest predators to have ever lived (the) supernova explosion may have caused its extinction, along with other megafauna, during the Pliocene marine megafauna extinction.
—
But no specific stellar location is mentioned in the article