Earth-pages asked this question in August 2020 because it had been suggested that at least one mass extinction – the protracted faunal decline during the Late Devonian – may provide evidence that supernovas can have deadly influence. The authors of the paper that I discussed proposed mass spectrometric analysis of isotopes, such as ¹⁴⁶Sm, ²³⁵U and  ²⁴⁴Pu  in sediments deposited in an extinction event to test the hypothesis. In the 14 May issue of Science a multinational group of geochemists and physicists, led by Anton Wallner of the Australian National University, report detection of alien isotopes in roughly 10 million-year-old sediments sampled from the Pacific Ocean floor (Wallner, A and 12 others 2021. ⁶⁰Fe and ²⁴⁴Pu deposited on Earth constrain the r-process yields of recent nearby supernovae. Science, v. 372, p. 742-745; DOI: 10.1126/science.aax3972).

Many of the chemical elements whose atomic masses are greater than 56 form by a thermonuclear fusion process known as rapid neutron capture – termed the ‘r-process’ by physicists. This requires such high energy that the likely heavy-element ‘nurseries must be events such as supernovas and/or mergers of neutron stars. The iron and plutonium isotopes  detected at very low concentrations are radioactive, with half-lives of 2.6 Ma for ⁶⁰Fe and 80.6 Ma for ²⁴⁴Pu. That makes it impossible for them to be terrestrial in origin because, over the lifetime of the Earth, they would decayed away completely. They must be from recent, alien sources either in our galaxy or one of the nearby galaxies. In fact two ‘doses’ were involved. The authors make no comment on any relationship with marine or continental extinctions at that time in the Miocene Epoch