#interstellardust — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #interstellardust, aggregated by home.social.
-
Something to ponder upon. 🙂
"Dominik Koll at the Helmholtz Research Centre in Dresden, Germany, and his collaborators melted 295 kilograms of Antarctic ice cores formed from snow that fell between 40,000 and 81,000 years ago. The team then counted the atoms of 60Fe in the meltwater.
Their measurements suggest that 60Fe was deposited on each square centimetre of Antarctica at rates as low as one atom every five years. These rates are lower than those found in more recent periods, measured by sampling snow and marine sediment from the past 40,000 years.
The authors say this suggests that, during the past 40,000 years, the Solar System has been crossing a region called the Local Interstellar Cloud where interstellar dust is relatively dense.. By contrast, before that period, the Solar System was traversing the cloud’s outskirts, where the dust is less dense."