This article is not up to the standards I expect from the Times. It is important that the authors and editors understand the science they are writing about and something clearly went wrong here.
8
This article needs a bit more editing. “Five isotopes of iron 60...” is a terribly misleading phrase. Do they mean five iron 60 atoms? Iron 60 is an isotope.
Also, ““They’re short-lived things.” That is a telltale sign they were made recently and nearby. Iron-60 has been found on Earth in oceanic crust that is millions of years old and on the surface of the moon, indications that the isotope circulated through the solar system long ago. But iron-60 from supernovas has never been found in geologically young material; its discovery in relatively fresh snow would suggest that it’s still raining down on Earth”. Is a short-lived thing millions of years old, or is “millions of years” synonymous with “recently”? Why such vagueness? Mention some data, numbers, and their uncertainties as reported in the paper. Any relevant scientists among the editors?
16
What I find the hardest to believe, after reading articles such as this, is that there are still those that ascribe to the theory that the Earth much less the solar system, Galaxy, Local Group, etc., are but 6000 years old...
Keep up the good work with these science articles. Though you may not get as many comments as some of the other stories on NYT, speaking for myself, these are the best stories of all!
15
Not worth having the ice melt though...
5
"Mr. Koll and his colleagues detected five isotopes of iron-60 in the filtered solids."
Without going through the Physical Review paywall, I can’t be sure, but my guess is they found five ATOMS of iron-60. Likewise, I would guess they found a quadrillion other iron atoms, not a “quadrillion other iron isotopes”.
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@joshbarnes: My thought exactly. It also makes me wonder how the ratio of iron-60 to manganese-53 atoms can be 160 times higher than what's found in dust-rich meteorites, or in anything else.
7
"The scientists had to sift through more than 9 quadrillion other iron isotopes, most of them iron-56."
The writer seems to confused about what an isotope is. I wonder what she means: 9 quadrillion atoms?
I've never understood why respected newspapers like the Times don't assign scientifically literate reporters to write science articles. It's not like people with STEM background are that hard to find.
10
@Orthoducks The writer has a PhD in astrophysics. I assume that the sloppiness arose from careless writing or editing, not ignorance.
10
You might want to look up something called the "Local Bubble". Right now the Solar System is moving through a volume of space contains much less gas than the average for the galaxy. The bubble is reckoned to be about 300 light-years across. Atoms in the gas are emitting X-rays.
Why is this important? Because the bubble is reckoned to be the remnant of supernovas that occurred in the last ten to twenty million years. The favorite candidates are stars that formed in the Pleiades cluster and exploded after a short life, as massive stars do. So these snow results are not that surprising.
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The real problem is not Iron-60 but the shocking presence of Dolt-45 in the White House.
Own any gold? It was cooked up in a supernova.
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@Plennie Wingo
Actually, scientists have computed that supernovas do not produce enough of the really heavy elements to be their primary source. Collisions of neutron stars are more likely to be the source of gold, etc.
15
"Mr. Koll and his colleagues detected five isotopes of iron-60 in the filtered solids." I think this means that Mr. Kroll and his colleagues detected five isotopes of iron, of which iron-60 is one.
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@B. Dennison: Almost certainly what was meant was, "five atoms of iron-60" amongst "quadrillions of atoms of other isotopes, mostly iron-56".
5
@B. Dennison According to the paper, they detected 5 *atoms* of iron-60.
5
I was trying to decipher that as well. It didn’t fit with my understanding of an isotope.
I wondered though if the writer meant 5 individual atoms. This because of his subsequent statement that they sifted through 9 quadrillion isotopes, mostly Iron-56. I think the writer was confusing atoms (or molecules) with isotopes. I’m sure there are not 9 quadrillion isotopes of iron.
1
"Mr. Koll and his colleagues detected five isotopes of iron-60 in the filtered solids."
This is definitely not my field but this statement seems odd. My understanding is that Iron-60 *is* an isotope. It cannot have 5 other isotopes. According to Wikipedia, iron has 4 stable isotopes and 24 known radioactive isotopes. But the author talks about a quadrillion other iron isotopes. As I said, this is definitely not my field of expertise, but this seems incorrect.
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@Engineer
I believe this was a mistake in the writing. They didn't sift through 24 quadrillion isotopes but rather 24 quadrillion isotope atoms to find each iron-60 atom?
4
Just curious: I assume the supernova mentioned in the article was many light years away. Since the dust is a physical substance, it should travel many times slower than light waves, so how is it possible that it has been found in Antarctic snow, which is no more than, say, a few hundred million years?
3
@Rob Ordman, Iron-60 has a half-life of 2.6 million years. In that time, a dust grain (bearing Iron-60) could drift several hundred light years. Thus, this method is sensitive to supernova events in our neighborhood, but iron-60 from more distant explosions would have decayed away during transit.
17