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The Early Solar System

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Astrophysics with Radioactive Isotopes

Part of the book series: Astrophysics and Space Science Library ((ASSL,volume 453))

Abstract

This chapter reviews the early history of the solar system from radioactive nuclei of very different half-lives, which were recognized to have been present alive in pristine solids. Such radioactivities open a unique window on the evolution of the solar nebula and provide tools for understanding the crucial events that determined and accompanied the formation of the Sun. The understanding of the astrophysical origin of these unstable isotopes is still not complete and leaves puzzles and questions to our nucleosynthesis and stellar evolution models. We need to consider following aspects, among others: (1) The determination of an age for solar system bodies, as it emerged especially from the application of radioactive dating from long-lived isotopes. (2) A synthetic account of the measurements that proved the presence of shorter-lived radioactive nuclei (especially those of half-life lower than about 100 Myr) in the Early Solar System (hereafter ESS). (3) An explanation of their existence in terms of nuclear processes. We often only have incomplete and/or qualitative views of such complex processes. Additionally, these may have occurred at a galactic scale (providing a galactic inheritance), or at the level of the molecular cloud in which the Sun was formed, or also locally, either through a single, late stellar contamination affecting the pre-collapse solar nebula or through high-energy phenomena induced by the same early sun, in its flares or in the bombardment of pristine solids with the energetic particles of its intense winds.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this Chapter, the terms long-lived and short-lived are used as related to the existence, or not, of daughter isotopes from the radioactive decay in the material sample. For short-lived radioactivities, only the daughter isotopes are present, while for long-lived, both parent and daughter isotopes are found in the sample.

  2. 2.

    The main formal change with respect to the appearance of Fig. 6.1 is in the tracks with slope − 1, which in the new plot would be vertical, as both nuclei of the abscissa would be stable.

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Busso, M. (2018). The Early Solar System. In: Diehl, R., Hartmann, D., Prantzos, N. (eds) Astrophysics with Radioactive Isotopes. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 453. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91929-4_6

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