Abstract

Earth is constantly bombarded with extraterrestrial dust containing invaluable information about extraterrestrial processes, such as structure formation by stellar explosions or nucleosynthesis, which could be traced back by long-lived radionuclides. Here, we report the very first detection of a recent ⁶⁰Fe influx onto Earth by analyzing 500 kg of snow from Antarctica by accelerator mass spectrometry. By the measurement of the cosmogenically produced radionuclide ⁵³Mn, an atomic ratio of ⁶⁰Fe / ⁵³Mn =0.017 was found, significantly above cosmogenic production. After elimination of possible terrestrial sources, such as global fallout, the excess of ⁶⁰Fe could only be attributed to interstellar ⁶⁰Fe which might originate from the solar neighborhood.