Thomas Lawson (Hull University)

Radioactive nuclei with long half-lives are often used to measure time scales, such as the age of the Galaxy. By looking at meteoric data we can use short-lived radioisotopes (0.1 to 100 Myr) to identify the potential sources of enrichment in the early Solar System.

A single core collapse supernova event is considered to be a promising candidate for the injection of many short-lived radioactive nuclei into the protosolar cloud or protoplanetary disk. This work takes a variety of core collapse supernovae models and determines which of these best correlates with high-precision meteoric data of the early Solar System, examining a series of fifteen short-lived radioisotopes. The time delay between the radioisotope's ejection and the incorporation into the first solids is also taken into account. The nucleosynthetic yields are produced using a collection of models with a range of explosion energies and remnant masses, and post processed by the NuGrid collaboration. A total of 62 models are examined, derived from three progenitor stellar masses (15, 20 and 25 solar masses). The yields from these models are compared to the most up to date meteoric analysis to explain the circumstances for the environment of the birth of the Sun, and if any of these circumstances can directly reproduce the early Solar System abundances. We find that in order to reproduce the early Solar System abundances of 60Fe we require a mechanism that limits the neutron burst in the helium shell, such as hydrogen ingestion.