Abstract
Radioactive nuclei can not be not infinitely old or they would now be gone. This point had first been made by Lord Rutherford, who concluded in 1929 (Rutherford 1929) that the elements had been created in the sun 100 million years ago and had somehow got from sun to earth! Terrible astrophysics, but his argument showed profound appreciation of the conundrum of live radioactivity on earth; namely, the nuclei must be created. By the middle of the twentieth century, the consequences had progressed no further. The question, “Why aren’t they all gone?” went largely unspoken.
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Notes
- 1.
At that time, the halflife of 60Fe was best-known as 1.5 My.
- 2.
The mean life of 60Fe is now known as 3.8 My.
- 3.
Readers wishing familiarity with these topics can best consult later chapters of this book, or Clayton and Nittler (2004), and Astrophysical Implications of the Laboratory Study of Presolar Materials (Bernatowicz and Zinner, 1997); the Handbook of Isotopes in the Cosmos by Clayton (2003) also presents many astrophysical consequences.
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Clayton, D. (2011). The Role of Radioactive Isotopes in Astrophysics. In: Diehl, R., Hartmann, D., Prantzos, N. (eds) Astronomy with Radioactivities. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 812. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12698-7_2
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