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Evidence of the most powerful solar storm in history has been uncovered in an unlikely place: within the rings of a tree. This immensely powerful solar storm is thought to have been at least 10 times as powerful as the Carrington Event of 1859, which caused chaos in the rudimentary telegraph system of the time. The researchers found a strange spike in radiocarbon within the rings of subfossilized trees dating to around 14,300 years ago. "Fusa Miyake discovered a sudden and unexpected spike in radiocarbon levels in a Japanese tree from 774 AD. Initially, this was thought to have been...

What Happens If A Star Explodes Near The Earth?Veritasium | November 15, 2022

Named Miyake events after the lead author of the first study to describe them, the spikes occur roughly once every 1,000 years or so and are recorded as sudden increases in the radiocarbon levels of ancient tree rings. The leading theory among scientists is that Miyake events are solar flares that are 80 times more powerful than the strongest flare ever recorded. But a new study...suggests that the origin of the radiation bursts could be even more mysterious than first thought. Scientists have spotted six Miyake events in tree rings so far, indicated by sudden, single-year leaps in the concentrations...

Plutonium is generally thought of as an artificial element created by humans, primarily to make the pits of nuclear weapons, but naturally occurring plutonium can be found in ancient rocks. Plutonium 244 is the longest lived isotope of Plutonium, but it's not easy to make, and finding this specific isotope in interstellar dust grains laid down on the ocean floors tells us important things about the formation of the elements that make up the Earth.Based on this paper:60Fe and 244Pu deposited on Earth constrain the r-process yields of recent nearby supernovae A. Wallner et al

Scientists found that the level of carbon-14, an isotope of carbon, was much higher in rings from that year than usual. Some years later, looking at air samples from ice cores, scientists saw that there were elevated levels of beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 as well. The common factor in all these elements is that they are created when extremely high-energy subatomic particles hit Earth's air and ground. .... The only way to get particles at energies like this is from space, where powerful magnetic fields in exploding stars...can accelerate the particles to such high speeds. But the 774 event was so...

NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU) ===================================================================== Supernovas may have affected the Earth’s climate in the last 40,000 years. Tree-ring data suggests supernovas caused spikes in radiocarbon. Could the next nearby supernova cause a collapse of civilization? ====================================================================== Dendrochronology is a fancy word for tree-ring dating, where the age of a tree can be determined by the number of growth rings across its trunk. But there’s a lot more to learn from looking at a tree’s rings than simply its age. Like fingerprints, tree rings give scientists clues to what the world was like when a tree was alive....

In its 4.5 billion year history, Earth has had to run the gauntlet. Numerous catastrophes have imperilled the planet, from massive impacts, to volcanic conflagrations, to frigid episodes of snowball Earth. Yet life persists. Among all of the hazards that threaten a planet, the most potentially calamitous might be a nearby star exploding as a supernova. When a massive enough star reaches the end of its life, it explodes as a supernova (SN). The hyper-energetic explosion can light up the sky for months, turning night into day for any planets close enough. If a planet is too close, it will...

In its 4.5 billion year history, Earth has had to run the gauntlet. Numerous catastrophes have imperilled the planet, from massive impacts, to volcanic conflagrations, to frigid episodes of snowball Earth. Yet life persists. Among all of the hazards that threaten a planet, the most potentially calamitous might be a nearby star exploding as a supernova. Whan a massive enough star reaches the end of its life, it explodes as a supernova. The hyper-energetic explosion can light up the sky for months, turning night into day for any planets close enough. If a planet is too close, it will be...

Radioactive elements synthesized in massive stars are ejected into space via stellar winds and supernova explosions. Our Solar System moves through the interstellar medium and collects these extrasolar products. One such product is iron-60. Because it is not naturally produced on Earth, the presence of this radioactive isotope is a sensitive indicator of supernova explosions within the last few million years. Australian National University’s Dr. Anton Wallner and colleagues previously found traces of iron-60 at about 2.6 million years ago, and possibly another at around 6 million years ago, suggesting our planet had traveled through fallout clouds from nearby supernovae....

Earth's solid surface and moderate climate may be due, in part, to a massive star in the birth environment of the Sun, according to new computer simulations of planet formation. Without the star's radioactive elements injected into the early solar system, our home planet could be a hostile ocean world covered in global ice sheets."The results of our simulations suggest that there are two qualitatively different types of planetary systems," said Tim Lichtenberg of the National Centre of Competence in Research PlanetS in Switzerland. "There are those similar to our solar system, whose planets have little water, and those in...

A newly examined ice core shows what may be the chemical traces of supernovae that exploded a thousand years ago. Yuko Motizuki of the RIKEN research institute in Wako, Japan, and colleagues analysed the nitrate content of an ice core drilled at Dome Fuji station in Antarctica. Nitrate is produced in the atmosphere by nitrogen oxides, which in turn should be created by the gamma radiation from a supernova. Motizuki's group found high nitrate concentrations in three thin layers about 50 metres deep. Because snow gradually builds up into layers of ice, depth indicates age. After calibrating this icy calendar...

(Phys.org)—Until recently, the years 774 and 775 were best known for Charlemagne's victory over the Lombards. But earlier this year, a team of scientists in Japan discovered a baffling spike in carbon-14 deposits within the rings of cedar trees that matched those same years. Because cosmic rays are tied to carbon-14 concentrations, scientists around the world have wondered about the cause: a nearby supernova, a gamma ray burst in the Milky Way or an intense superflare emanating from the Sun? Now, Adrian Melott, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas and Brian Thomas, KU alumnus and professor...

A DEVASTATING burst of gamma-rays may have caused one of Earth's worst mass extinctions, 443 million years ago. A team of astrophysicists and palaeontologists says the pattern of trilobite extinctions at that time resembles the expected effects of a nearby gamma-ray burst (GRB). Although other experts have greeted the idea with some scepticism, most agree that it deserves further investigation. GRBs are the most powerful explosions known. As giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives, they fire incredibly intense pulses of gamma rays from their poles that can be detected even from across the universe...

About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light years away from Earth. Within a few hundred years, long after the strange light in the sky had dwindled, a tsunami of cosmic energy from that same shattering star explosion could have reached our planet and pummeled the atmosphere, touching off climate change and triggering mass extinctions of large ocean animals, including a shark species that was the size of a school bus. The effects of such a supernova—and possibly more than...

...in a new study, published in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers from the University of Chicago... suggest that our solar system formed billions of years ago in a vast "bubble" of gas and dust around a giant, long-dead star, contradicting the commonly held view which suggests a nearby supernova was responsible... The dead star in question is what scientists call a Wolf-Rayet star. These are more than 40 to 50 times the size of our own Sun and burn hotter than any other stars, producing vast quantities of material -- much of which is blown off the surface by intense stellar...

We exist, therefore we question. Or at least, that paraphrases (poorly) an old quote from an old scholar... We know the masses and general composition of the four inner (rocky) planets in our solar system, and from basic chemistry, we know the number of atoms in a gram of any material. Multiplying Avogadro's number x the mass of these four planets, dividing by a weighted average atomic weight for the materials in each planet, we get about 3 x 10^ 50 heavy nuclei produced since creation/the big bang. Take your pick, that's the number of atomic nuclei we have to...

Might also answer poser: 'If supernovae were popcorn...' NASA's Hubble telescope has spotted the most distant massive star explosion of its kind ever, one which could help boffins understand the very fabric of the universe. Hubble view of supernova SN Wilson The telescope picked out Supernova UDS10Wil, also known as SN Wilson, in the night sky. The star apparently blew up over 10 billion years ago, and the resulting light from the explosion took that long to reach Earth. Wilson is in the special class of Type Ia supernovae, which give astroboffins a consistent level of brightness that can be...

Researchers then scoured the globe for thin layers of radioactive isotopes in rock strata and in 1999 struck figurative gold: Samples from beneath the ocean revealed some hard metallic layers, known as ferromanganese crusts that form slowly over millions of years, containing iron-60, an isotope with a half-life of 2.6 million years -- so short that the material must be much younger than Earth. The iron-60 was in a stratum laid down 2.2 million years ago. Similar layers of iron-60 have since been found elsewhere in the oceans. Astronomers have also been scouring the skies for groups of stars that...

Millions of years ago, a series of nearby supernovae sent radiation and debris raining down to Earth. The events left traces of radioactive iron-60 embedded in the sea floor and even on the Moon, and now, researchers are saying they may have had life-altering effects on the early inhabitants of our planet. At just hundreds of light-years away, two major stellar explosions may have spurred changes to the environment, and even increased the rates of cancer and mutation.

An international team of scientists has found evidence of a series of massive supernova explosions near our solar system, which showered Earth with radioactive debris. The scientists found radioactive iron-60 in sediment and crust samples taken from the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The iron-60 was concentrated in a period between 3.2 and 1.7 million years ago, which is relatively recent in astronomical terms, said research leader Dr Anton Wallner from The Australian National University (ANU). "We were very surprised that there was debris clearly spread across 1.5 million years," said Dr Wallner, a nuclear physicist in the ANU Research...