Related papers: Some selected comments on cosmic radioactivities
Research in cosmic rays is now nearly a century old, but most of the fundamental questions in this field remain unanswered, on the other hand the perspectives of future studies in the next decade are very bright. New detectors will provide…
Cosmic background radiation, both diffuse and discrete in nature, produced at different cosmic epochs before and after recombination, provides key information on the evolution of cosmic structures. We discuss the main classes of sources…
Meteoritic evidence shows that the Solar system at birth contained significant quantities of short-lived radioisotopes (SLRs) such as 60Fe and 26Al (with half-lives of 2.6 and 0.7 Myr respectively) produced in supernova explosions and in…
Continuum gamma-ray emission produced by interactions of cosmic rays with interstellar matter and radiation fields is a probe of non-thermal particle populations in galaxies. After decades of continuous improvements in experimental…
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-timescale bursts of coherent radio emission that are luminous enough to be detectable at cosmological distances. In this review I describe the discovery of FRBs, subsequent advances in our…
Reactions between atomic nuclei are measured in great detail in terrestrial laboratory experiments; transferring and extrapolating this knowledge to how the same reactions act within cosmic environments presents major challenges.…
The late stages of stellar evolution from asymptotic giant branch stars to planetary nebulae are now known to be an active phase of molecular synthesis. Over 80 gas-phase molecules have been detected through rotational transitions in the…
Recent improvements in stellar models for intermediate-mass and massive stars are recalled, together with their expectations for the synthesis of radioactive nuclei of lifetime $\tau \lesssim 25$ Myr, in order to re-examine the origins of…
This paper shows that ultrastrong magnetic fields (such as those of magnetars) and dense astrophysical plasmas can reduce the half life of alpha decaying nuclei by many orders of magnitude. In such environments the conventional…
We bring you, as usual, the Sun and Moon and stars, plus some galaxies and a new section on astrobiology. Some highlights are short (the newly identified class of gamma-ray bursts, and the Deep Impact on Comet 9P/ Tempel 1), some long (the…
Present and future observations of supernova relic neutrinos (SRNs), i.e., a cosmological neutrino background from past core-collapse supernova explosions, potentially give us useful information concerning various fields of astrophysics,…
All types of interaction of a magnetized plasma flow with an obstacle (magnetized or not) are considered, and those susceptible to produce a radio signature are identified. The role of the sub-Alfv\'enic or super-Alfv\'enic character of the…
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration flashes of radio waves that are visible at distances of billions of light-years. The nature of their progenitors and their emission mechanism remain open astrophysical questions. Here we…
Astrophysical gamma-ray spectroscopy is a most valuable tool for studying nuclear astrophysics, as well as recent star formation in the Milky Way. After a short, historical, introduction to the field, I present a brief review of the most…
The rate of ionization by cosmic rays in interstellar gas directly associated with gamma-ray emitting supernova remnants is for the first time calculated to be several orders of magnitude larger than the Galactic average. Analysis of…
We discuss some open problems in the understanding of the Early Solar System abundances of short-lived radioactive isotopes, and the important clarification expected on this matter by precise measurements of the average galactic abundances…
The study of high energy cosmic rays is a diversified field of observational and phenomenological physics addressing questions ranging from shock acceleration of charged particles in various astrophysical objects, via transport properties…
Over the last third of the century, a few tens of events, detected by ground-based cosmic ray detectors, have opened a new window in the field of high-energy astrophysics. These events have macroscopic energies, unobserved sources, an…
We explore the cosmological signals of theories in which the neutrinos decay into invisible dark radiation after becoming non-relativistic. We show that in this scenario, near-future large scale structure measurements from the Euclid…
At the basis of most risk assessments aimed at determining the long-term trends in changes in the activity of radionuclides in the environment and thus exposure to ionizing radiation, various concepts of half-lives are used, particularly:…