In grade school, we learned about the great physicists and chemists who helped shape the world one theory at a time. From Galileo Galilei to Albert Einstein, the list goes on and on. One particular scientist we got to know was Madame Marie Curie.
Curie, along with her husband Pierre, became the pioneers of radioactivity in the 1900s. The couple discovered elements such as Radium and Polonium, and received the Nobel Prize in Physics, which they shared with Henri Becquerel.
Because of the Curies' contributions to science, a chemical element discovered in 1944 was named after them.
The rare radioactive silvery metal is known as Curium. Scientists believe that the elusive element does not occur in nature and must be made in a nuclear reactor by capturing neutrons from plutonium and americium isotopes.
Yet a team of cosmochemists from the University of Chicago and Massachusetts Institute of Technology found evidence of curium in a meteorite, indicating that the rare element was present during the formation of our solar system. This astonishing discovery could end the almost four-decade-old debate regarding the element's possible presence in the early solar system.
The research team, which is comprised of François Tissot, Nicolas Dauphas, and Lawrence Grossman, discovered the evidence of curium within an unusual ceramic piece they call "Curious Marie" that was taken from a carbon-rich meteorite.
The rare element was incorporated into the piece when it condensed from the gaseous cloud that formed the sun during the early formation of the solar system, scientists said.
Dauphas, who is a professor at UChicago's Geophysical Sciences department, said finding evidence of the presence of curium in the early solar system is exciting for scientists because they can use chronometers to date the relative ages of planets and meteorites.
The longest-lived curium isotope Cm-247 decays over time into U-235, a uranium isotope. A rock or mineral which had formed early in the solar system would have incorporated more Cm-247 compared to a similar rock or mineral that formed much later.
If scientists were able to analyze these theoretical minerals, they would see that the older mineral would contain more U-235 as the decay of Cm-247.
"The idea is simple enough, yet, for nearly 35 years, scientists have argued about the presence of Cm-247 in the early solar system," said Tissot, who is also a professor at UChicago.
Additionally, their models estimate that if curium were indeed present in the early solar system, its abundance was low.
The team's findings are featured in the journal Science Advances.
