The RADIOSTAR Project

Lugaro, Maria; Côté, Benoit; Pignatari, Marco; Yagüe López, Andrés; Brinkman, Hannah; Cseh, Borbála; Den Hartogh, Jacqueline; Doherty, Carolyn Louise; Karakas, Amanda Irene; Kobayashi, Chiaki; Lawson, Thomas; Pető, Mária; Soós, Benjámin; Trueman, Thomas; Világos, Blanka

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 Milky Way Galaxy, and their presence in molecular clouds. So far, we have discovered that: (i) radioactive nuclei produced by slow (107Pd and182Hf) and rapid (129 I and247Cm) 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 107 years, and (iii) the abundances of the very short-lived nuclei26Al,36Cl, and41Ca 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 of107Pd 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 of53Mn and60Fe and of the p-process isotopes92Nb and146Sm.

Citation

Lugaro, M., Côté, B., Pignatari, M., Yagüe López, A., Brinkman, H., Cseh, B., Den Hartogh, J., Doherty, C. L., Karakas, A. I., Kobayashi, C., Lawson, T., Pető, M., Soós, B., Trueman, T., & Világos, B. (2022). The RADIOSTAR Project. Universe, 8(2), Article 130. https://doi.org/10.3390/universe8020130

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 7, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Feb 17, 2022
• Publication Date: Feb 1, 2022
• Deposit Date: May 2, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: May 3, 2024
• Journal: Universe
• Electronic ISSN: 2218-1997
• Publisher: MDPI
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 8
• Issue: 2
• Article Number: 130
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/universe8020130
• Keywords: Short-lived radioactivity; Early Solar System; Stellar nucleosynthesis; Galactic chemical evolution
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/3928514