Thursday, 8 September 2005

This presentation is part of: Poster Session II

Chemical procedures for extracting ¹²⁹I, ⁶⁰Fe and ²⁶Al from marine sediments; prospects for detection of a 3 My old supernova

For the past 3 years we have been developing a procedure to measure carrier free ¹²⁹I/I ratios in gram size quantities of marine sediments. Potential applications involve dating of old (> 10 My) sediments and the detection of ¹²⁹I from a purported supernova explosion ~2.8 My ago, that has been inferred from ⁶⁰Fe in a Mn crust [1]. As part of this work, we have tested several methods of precleaning the sediments to remove anthropogenic and/or labile iodine. We realized that one of these cleaning procedures would also allow the subsequent isolation of authigenic ⁶⁰Fe and ²⁶Al, thus potentially permitting the AMS measurement of all 3 isotopes in the same sample. We will outline here the chemical procedure developed, and briefly comment on its possible application to the supernova problem.

[1] Knie, K., Korschinek, G. Faestermann, T. Dorfi, E.A., Rugel, R.&Wallner, A. ⁶⁰Fe anomaly in a deep-sea manganese crust and implications for a nearby supernova source. Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 171103 (2004).

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