Science Alert: Earth Appears to Be Travelling Through The Debris of Ancient Supernovae

• Earth Appears to Be Travelling Through The Debris of Ancient Supernovae
  by MICHELLE STARR, 24 AUGUST 2020, https://www.sciencealert.com/
  Radioactive dust deep beneath the ocean waves suggests that Earth is moving through a massive cloud left behind by an exploded star. Continuously, for the last 33,000 years, space has been seeding Earth with a rare isotope of iron forged in supernovae.
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  It’s not the first time that the isotope, known as iron-60, has dusted our planet. But it does contribute to a growing body of evidence that such dusting is ongoing – we are still moving through an interstellar cloud of dust that could have originated from a supernova millions of years ago.
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  Iron-60 has been the focus of several studies over the years. It has a half-life of 2.6 million years, which means it completely decays after 15 million years – so any samples found here on Earth must have been deposited from elsewhere, since there’s no way any iron-60 could have survived from the formation of the planet 4.6 billion years ago.
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  And deposits have been found. Nuclear physicist Anton Wallner of the Australian National University previously dated seabed deposits back to 2.6 million and 6 million years ago, suggesting that debris from supernovae had rained down on our planet at these times. But there’s more recent evidence of this stardust – much more recent. It’s been found in the Antarctic snow; according to the evidence, it had to have fallen in the last 20 years.
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