In 2016, researchers published "slam dunk" evidence, based on iron-60 isotopes in ancient seabed, that supernovae buffeted the Earth -- one of them about 2.6 million years ago. University of Kansas researcher Adrian Melott, professor of physics and astronomy, supported those findings in Nature with an associated letter, titled "Supernovae in the neighborhood."
Melott has followed up since those findings with an examination of the effects of the supernovae on Earth's biology. In new research to appear in Astrophysical Journal, the KU researcher and colleagues argue the estimated distance of the supernova thought to have occurred roughly 2.6 million years ago should be cut in half.
"There's even more evidence of that supernova now," he said. "The timing estimates are still not exact, but the thing that changed to cause us to write this paper is the distance. We did this computation because other people did work that made a revised distance estimate, which cut the distance in half. But now, our distance estimate is more like 150 light years."
A supernova exploding at such a range probably wouldn't touch off mass extinctions on Earth, Melott said.
"People estimated the 'kill zone' for a supernova in a paper in 2003, and they came up with about 25 light years from Earth," he said. "Now we think maybe it's a bit greater than that. They left some effects out or didn't have good numbers, so now we think it may be a bit larger distance. We don't know precisely, and of course it wouldn't be a hard-cutoff distance. It would be a gradual change. But we think something more like 40 or 50 light years. So, an event at 150 light years should have some effects here but not set off a mass extinction."
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