Supernovae , that is, the explosions produced by the collapse of massive stars, only leave us a flash of light in the sky: small amounts of matter from these phenomena also reach Earth . In fact, scientists suspect that many elements present on our planet, such as iron, potassium, lead, gold or silver, come from supernovae.
Or at least until now they believed so , because the results of new research, published in Nature Communications , contradicts the theory. Scientists have analyzed galactic dust deposited in the sea in the last 25 years to detect heavy elements such as uranium and potassium, which would also have been expelled by starbursts.
Specifically, they have focused on plutonium-244, which due to its radioactive nature could only have reached Earth in the last hundreds of millions of years.
The surprise is that they have found 100 times less of this element than expected . Perhaps, they speculate, plutonium and other heavy radioactive elements do not ultimately come from supernovae, but from even more unusual and violent events such as the merger of two neutron stars.
