The RADIOSTAR project
Date
2022
Authors
Lugaro, Maria
Côté, Benoit
Pignatari, Marco
Yagüe López, Andrés
Brinkman, Hannah
Cseh, Borbála
Den Hartogh, Jacqueline
Doherty, Carolyn Louise
Karakas, Amanda Irene
Kobayashi, Chiaki
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universe
Abstract
Radioactive nuclei are the key to understanding the circumstances of the birth of our
Sun because meteoritic analysis has proven that many of them were present at that time. Their
origin, however, has been so far elusive. The ERC-CoG-2016 RADIOSTAR project is dedicated to
investigating the production of radioactive nuclei by nuclear reactions inside stars, their evolution in
the MilkyWay Galaxy, and their presence in molecular clouds. So far, we have discovered that: (i)
radioactive nuclei produced by slow (107^Pd and 182^Hf) and rapid (129^I and 247^Cm) neutron captures
originated from stellar sources —asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars and compact binary mergers,
respectively—within the galactic environment that predated the formation of the molecular cloud
where the Sun was born; (ii) the time that elapsed from the birth of the cloud to the birth of the Sun
was of the order of 10^7 years, and (iii) the abundances of the very short-lived nuclei 26^Al, 36^Cl, and
41^Ca can be explained by massive star winds in single or binary systems, if these winds directly
polluted the early Solar System. Our current and future work, as required to finalise the picture of the
origin of radioactive nuclei in the Solar System, involves studying the possible origin of radioactive
nuclei in the early Solar System from core-collapse supernovae, investigating the production of 107^Pd
in massive star winds, modelling the transport and mixing of radioactive nuclei in the galactic and
molecular cloud medium, and calculating the galactic chemical evolution of 53^Mn and 60^Fe and of
the p-process isotopes 92^Nb and 146^Sm.
Description
Keywords
short-lived radioactivity, early Solar System, stellar nucleosynthesis, galactic chemical evolution
Citation
Lugaro, M., Côté, B., Pignatari, M., Yagüe López, A., Brinkman, H., Cseh, B, . . . Világos, B. (2022). “The RADIOSTAR project.” Universe, 8(2), 130. https://doi.org/10.3390/universe8020130