Космічний

Here is a concise answer based on the newly published (June 2026) study in Nature Astronomy:

The discovery: Researchers detected interstellar plutonium-244 atoms in a ferromanganese crust from the deep Pacific Ocean. They used accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) at the VEGA facility at ANSTO in Australia to identify the atoms .

Method and key negative result: The team analyzed successive layers of the crust and also searched for curium-247 (a shorter-lived r-process isotope). They found no curium-247 from space — only trace amounts from nuclear weapons testing . Because curium-247 has a much shorter half-life (15.6 million years) than plutonium-244 (80.6 million years), its absence implies that at least ~10 half-lives of curium-247 have passed since the event that produced these atoms. This shifts the production event to roughly 100–150 million years ago, not just a few million years as previously thought .

What the even distribution implies: The plutonium-244 was found distributed evenly across all layers of the crust — not concentrated in one layer corresponding to a single recent event . This indicates that the plutonium is still drifting through interstellar space and raining onto Earth continuously, long after the original event. The most likely source is a neutron-star merger (or a rare type of supernova/kilonova) rather than an ordinary core-collapse supernova, because:

• Ordinary supernovae do not produce enough heavy r-process elements like plutonium to match the observed signal .
• The prolonged, even rain of material points to a massive event that spread heavy elements across a large volume of the galaxy, with Earth still passing through the debris today .