Researchers Discover Stardust Sprinkled On a Nearby Asteroid

Researchers have discovered that samples of the Ryugu asteroid gathered in 2019 contain grains of stardust. NPR reports: The dust, which came from distant stars and drifted through space for millions or billions of years, could provide clues about how the solar system formed, according to Ann Nguyen, a cosmochemist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Stars forged nearly all of the elements of the Universe. Many of the atoms that make up our bodies were themselves made inside of the core of a star somewhere else. That's because the high pressures and temperatures can fuse lightweight atomic nuclei into heavier elements. "The core is extremely hot, and then you go out in the atmosphere, it's cool enough so that gas can form and aggregate into tiny grains," Nguyen says.

Think of these little grains as cosmic dust motes. Sometimes the star that formed these grains would explode, blowing them across the galaxy like dandelion seeds. Other times they would drift away on their own -- traveling on the stellar wind into deep space. "Probably a lot of them do get destroyed," Nguyen says, "but some of them survive and they make it to our region of the universe where our solar system formed." The stardust swirled and clumped and eventually became part of the sun, and the planets, and even us. That idea led the astronomer Carl Sagan to famously remark that "We're made of star-stuff." [...]

Nguyen says the grains look different than the material from our own solar system, because different stars leave different nuclear signatures in the atoms. "It kind of lights up like a Christmas tree light," she says. "Their isotopic signatures are just so different than the material that formed in our solar system or got homogenized in the solar system." Nguyen says that the stardust grains provide some clues about the types of stars that contributed to our solar system. It also shows that exploding stars, or supernovae, probably contributed more of the dust than researchers had previously believed. But above all, she says, these tiny grains are a reminder of the way in which we fit into the vast cosmos. "It just shows us how rich our Universe is," she says. "These materials all played a part in our life here on Earth." The researchers published their findings in the journal Science Advances.

I don't think

[rossdee]

that Stardust is a term used by astronomers.

Re:I don't think

[sg_oneill]

Being that its the actual scientific term and it was literally the name of the NASA mission that found it, thats a weird asseertion to make.

Also

ing a large grain) in GRV 021710 (Fig. 5) (36, 37). These abundances are similar to those in some anhydrous IDPs. Relative to chondritic meteorites, some IDPs and AMMs show elevated abundances of O-rich supernova stardust having large enrichments in 18O [e.g., (21, 31)], suggesting a heterogeneous distribution of supernova dust in the protoplanetary disk. Most of the presolar SiC grains in clasts 1 and 2 derive from C-rich AGB stars and have C, N, and Si isotopic compositions falling within the mainstream-, Y-, and Z-type classifications for SiC from AGB stars (fig. S5) (7). Differences in nucleosynthetic isotopic anomalies in noncarbonaceous and carbonaceous reservoirs have been linked to the heterogeneous distribution of presolar grains in the solar protoplanetary disk (38). The observed nucleosynthetic signatures require dust contributions from both supernova and AGB stars (38, 39). The inventory of refractory presolar grains in IDPs, AMMs, and clasts 1 and 2 in Ryugu samples also points to heterogeneous distributions of stardust from multiple stellar sources in the early solar system.

.....From the paper itself, which I'm sure you already knew since you read the paper before commenting on it?

Re:

[newbie_fantod]

Then Hoagy Carmichael was way ahead of his time

if you start with "I don't think"...

[Petr Blazek]

...stop commenting

Ohh Baby

[MrL0G1C]

..The music sounds better with you!

Aren't we all made up of stardust?

[nikkipolya]

As Neil deGrasse said, "We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out - and we have only just begun."

Re:

[ChatHuant]

As Neil deGrasse said [...]

Sagan said it first though (and, I think, more elegantly). From the first episode of his series "Cosmos":

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Aliens

[groobly]

It turns out that the alien that the Pentagon has is actually Tinkerbell.

Temperature of the corona

[0xG]

The core is extremely hot, and then you go out in the atmosphere, it's cool enough so that gas can form and aggregate into tiny grains,

Funny. I was taught that the corona was understood to be (surprisingly) hotter than the core. Obviously at a lower pressure though.

Re:

[Cyberax]

The core is at 15 million degrees C, and the corona is at ~1 million degrees C. Although it's not quite correct because the corona is not completely thermal, so assigning a fixed temperature to it is not entirely right.