Iron 60

E-mail to Alan Boss:

Alan,

I am teaching an introductory Astronomy class, I read your article with Sandra Keiser on the RT fingers, to support the idea of a supernova trigger for the solar system.

Today I found an article by Tang & Dauphas:

http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1212.1490

What's going on?

Was or wasn't our mother a supernova?

Eduardo

Alan's response: 

Hi Eduardo,

Thanks for the pointer to that paper -- I had not seen it as yet.

I think this paper makes the point that this is a field that is
still in flux -- we are not really very sure at all about many
of the details of how our solar system formed! The new 60Fe results
may not require a SN to have triggered presolar cloud collapse,
but the 26Al abundances still do, I believe.

Best wishes,
Alan

I am writing my Term Paper. It's almost done.