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Freshly made plutonium from outer space found on ocean floor
- donw 5y agoSomebody probably just ordered some highly radioactive isotopes from Advanced Space Civilization Amazon, and told them to leave it at the doorstep. Either that, or the dolphins are done putting up with our shit.
- lumost 5y agoOr a a nearby supernova happened to deposit plutonium and other heavy elements in a fine mist over the planet within the last 10 million years... I'm somewhat curious if modern human civilization happened to emerge in the last ~10ky simply because all other time periods since modern humans evolved were too unstable to support civilization.
- FredPret 5y agoWell it was raining plutonium until now
- wahern 5y ago> Somebody probably just ordered some highly radioactive isotopes from Advanced Space Civilization Amazon, and told them to leave it at the doorstep. You mean United Nuclear, which brokers[1] radio isotopes to the general public? https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2_5 https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2_... I don't see any Plutonium for sale, but that's not as interesting or useful as Cesium-137 or Polonium-210. They also sell Uranium ore, and do so directly, not brokered, so they have to be careful to vent Radon from their storage room. [1] IIRC, the Polonium-210 I received was sent directly from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. EDIT: The sample was actually sent by Spectrum Techniques (https://www.spectrumtechniques.com/ https://www.spectrumtechniques.com/). They must be ORNL adjacent or something.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoWow, that is way more affordable and easier than anything I found twenty years ago when I was looking! (Then again, back then things like this may very well have existed, but discovering them was a huge part of the problem.)
- donw 5y agoThat is massively cool! I wonder if you can get depleted uranium. Would love to grab a cube of it for discussions on density.
- donw 5y agoTurns out you can! But it's $750 for a one-centimeter cube, because the US government limits commercial sales of DU to 15kg per year.
- jabl 5y agoI thought they used DU as counterweight in some civilian airliners? But maybe the manufacturers have some special license to procure more DU..?
- freshair 5y agoDepleted uranium has indeed been used in airplanes. Some models of 747 have a ton or so of depleted uranium, though I believe this practice was phased out in later models. It's not just planes though. Some sailboats have been made with DU keels. Usually lead is used, but DU would presumably allow for a smaller (thinner?) keel.
- jacquesm 5y agoYou can dig it up in Iraq. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/us-depleted-uranium-weapons-civilian-areas-iraq https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/us-depleted-ur...
- DigiDigiorno 5y ago
- hiyer 5y agoThe scale of time in fields like astrophysics and geology never ceases to amaze me. When I saw freshly made, I thought it was recently created. Turns out it dropped on earth some time in the last 10 million years.
- dylan604 5y agoThis was my initial thoughts on reading the title as well. First thoughts were "what craft re-entered with that material" went to "oh, cosmologically recent".
- est31 5y agoOceanic plates are indeed quite young compared to the continental plates. Oceanic plates are made from heavier materials and subduct below the lighter continental plates, so they only live millions of years while the material making up continental plates lives billions.
- accrual 5y agoI sometimes wonder about interesting fossils and lifeforms we'll never know of, because they were subducted away before we ever had a chance to discover them.
- klodolph 5y agoI sometimes wonder if life evolved on exoplanets, complete with its own billions of years of fossil record, only to be obliterated when their star reaches the red giant phase.
- duxup 5y agoOr even on earth: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis Granted it is just a hypothesis but it is an interesting idea.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
- harshalizee 5y agoI'm amazed by how we can now detect an element with only several hundreds of atoms in a large chunk of rock.
- bradrn 5y agoI had a chemistry practical class just a couple of hours ago in which I asked about the sensitivity of mass spectrometry. I was amazed when I was told that it is sensitive enough to detect individual atoms. Modern analytical techniques really are amazing! (A book recommendation along these lines: Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal about Earth History, by Susan M. Gaines, Geoffrey Eglinton and Jurgen Rullkotter. If you already know a bit of chemistry, it’s a wonderful introduction to the techniques used to analyse rocks in organic geochemistry.)
- ISL 5y agoSome classes of (mostly older) neutrino-detection experiments detect single radionuclides in many tons of material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestake_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestake_experiment is perhaps the most-famous, but GALLEX and SAGE use a similar approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAGE_(Soviet%E2%80%93American_Gallium_Experiment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAGE_(Soviet%E2%80%93American_...
- jacquesm 5y agoFunny, I had a similar re-adjustment of my idea of what mass spectrometry is capable off a few weeks ago and I remember being totally amazed. That has come a very long way in the last decades. The tech behind it is fascinating too.
- donatj 5y agoSo does this mean we can move plutonium into the natural element category?
- galangalalgol 5y agoThat would be interesting, I wonder what other elements will eventually join it. Also, I'm sure they know what they are doing, but it came out of the ocean floor off the coast of Japan, how did they rule out Fukushima? Is the way it was incorporated into the rock make it certain?
- HenryKissinger 5y agoThe Fukushima disaster was only 10 years ago, which is an eye blink in geology.
- simonh 5y agoThey said a Japanese oil exploration company, not that it was near Japan. It could have been anywhere in the pacific, and it was as gifted to researchers in Australia not Japan. Radionucleotide contamination is an issue though. Apparently carbon dating will be useless to date anything since the 1950s in the future due to carbon isotope emissions from nuclear testing. So they must have taken care to ensure they were examining clean samples.
- spfzero 5y agoPretty sure it was not an isotope producible in an Earth fission reactor. A stable plutonium you could date back to only 10 million years old would be a different animal.
- saagarjha 5y agoWikipedia lists it as such, at least.
- adrian_b 5y agoActually plutonium belongs to the so-called primordial elements, which existed in the matter from which the Earth and the rest of the Solar System were made. Among the primordial element isotopes, a large number are radioactive, including e.g. certain isotopes of the potassium and calcium of our body. All the radioactive primordial element isotopes have partially decayed since the formation of the Earth, so they can be found now in smaller quantities than in the beginning. Among the isotopes that can still be found in large quantities, U235 has the smallest half-life and it has decreased about one hundred times. The next isotopes with the longest half-life, but lower than U235 are plutonium 244 and one isotope of samarium, which have half-time close to one hundred million years. So these 2 have decreased about 2^45 times. This is a lot so you would not be able to extract a visible quantity of plutonium from a terrestrial rock, but due to the huge number of atoms that existed in the entire Earth, there are still a few atoms of plutonium 244 that have survived from the formation of the Earth. A few years ago, it was announced that a team succeeded to detect some atoms of primordial plutonium 244 in some rocks, so the primordiality of plutonium can be considered as proven, even if that does not matter from a practical point of view, as there is too little primordial plutonium left, to be useful.
- 8bitsrule 5y ago"The Pacific Ocean is a major repository of plutonium released from atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons. Both global fallout from plutonium released to the stratosphere as well as close-in fallout from the troposphere contributed to the present levels of plutonium in seawater and sediment of the Pacific Ocean." [2001: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S156948600180019X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S156948600...] Now that is fresh. NPR's article fails to tell us how we can tell 'space' Pu from 'test' Pu. It further confounds the issue by calling it 'freshly Made Plutonium From Outer Space' then stating that fresh means 'arrived on Earth within the last 10 million years'. Bad science article.
- khuey 5y agoThe isotope in question is plutonium 244 which isn't known to be produced in appreciable quantities by nuclear weapons testing or nuclear reactors.
- 3327 5y agoCould an alien ship have landed and the ship is decayed and plutonium is what remains?
- mjfisher 5y agoOr it turns out Bertrand Russell's teapot was made of Plutonium and de-orbited.
- saul_goodman 5y ago...Ancient...Aliens...
- peter303 5y agoAn international scientific seafloor drilling project has drilled over 1500 deep holes in the past half century. The oldest seafloor sediments go to 220 million years. Anything older has been consumed by plate tectonics subduction. Scientists could count Pu244 in these cores to see how many nearby supernovae there were.
- jjk166 5y agoIt's honestly amazing that we can identify distinct supernovae that happened millions of years ago and find debris from them.
- jacquesm 5y agoConsidering that we are just self-aware debris from one such supernovae...
- ru552 5y agoThis may explain why that fish walked out of the water so long ago. Earth may have been a cooling tank for spent fuel rods used by an alien civilization. Ocean water levels depleted as a result of the cooling process which exposed the land masses. Radiation from the spent rods did radiating things to the surrounding organisms. IPSO FACTO, we're a result of the super powers bestowed to our watery ancestors. *edit /fiction ... because some people took this as super serious
- sigspec 5y agoSorry. This is my head canon now and I will spread it far and wide. As an exercise in creative writing, I think a fun story could be made.
- xiaolingxiao 5y agoalso explains where godzilla comes from