Collateral consequences of the inhomogeneous distribution of short-lived radionuclides in the solar nebula

Abstract— The presence of several short-lived (now extinct) radionuclides in the early solar system demands that they were synthesized and added to preexisting solar system materials shortly (on a time scale on the order of the relevant radionuclide lifetime) before formation of solar system solids. For diverse reasons, it is often suggested that the solar system distributions of these radionuclides were radically heterogeneous, perhaps because of the late addition. Much attention has been given to the astrophysical circumstances that might govern the synthesis and distribution of these short-lived radionuclides, but comparatively little attention has been devoted to the distribution of cosynthesized isotopes. The focus of this paper is a systematic, quantitative evaluation of the collateral consequences in stable and long-lived isotopes that might be expected if short-lived radionuclides, in particular ²⁶Al or ⁵³Mn, were injected at their canonical levels and inhomogeneously distributed in the early solar system. We mix model massive star yields of Meyer et al. (1995) and Woosley and Weaver (1995) into a reservoir of cosmic composition, as tabulated by Anders and Grevesse (1989). To mitigate the effects of systematic deviations that may be present in these mixtures due to uncertainties in model stellar yields, we follow Timmes and Clayton (1996) and also mix into a “renormalized” proxy solar system composition computed from a galactic chemical evolution model based primarily on the stellar yields of Woosley and Weaver (1995). The results are very unfavorable to the likelihood of heterogeneously distributed ²⁶Al derived from supernova ejecta. If a massive star is invoked to account for ²⁶Al, its ejecta must have been rather uniformly distributed, as inferred from the lack of measured collateral anomalies in several elements, notably Ca, Cr, and Ni. Conversely, if ²⁶Al were indeed radically heterogeneously distributed, some other nucleosynthetic source more efficient at producing ²⁶Al is required. In principle, a similar statement applies to ⁵³Mn, but the situation is more complicated. The inferred anomalies at ⁵³Cr will depend not only on how much ⁵³Mn is added by a heterogeneous component, but also more sensitively on the contributions to the associated stable nuclides, ⁵³Cr, ⁵²Cr, and ⁵⁰Cr. Consideration of predicted collateral anomalies provides no direct support for heterogeneously distributed supernova-derived ⁵³Mn, but the required quantity of supernova contribution, and thus also the collateral anomalies, are much less for ⁵³Mn than for ²⁶Al. With allowance for model calculation uncertainties, it could be argued that anomalies collateral to heterogeneous ⁵³Mn might be small enough to have evaded detection.