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Collecting Stardust
An anonymous reader writes "Washington University in St. Louis space scientists are reporting the first definitive laboratory dissection of an interstellar dust particle, thus pulling out each grain's history individually. When collected at high-altitude, the origin of six grains are from outside our solar system. 'Space' is full of dust, or ejected material from long-dead stars. In this case, 3 of the 6 dust grains are from red giant stars, and perhaps 2 are from supernovae. In the next 5 years, there are six missions targeting a rendezvous with either a comet or asteroid, including the Stardust mission to return the first extraterrestrial samples since Apollo. That only leaves 100 billion comets left to explore in our own solar system's Oort cloud." Update: 02/28 17:22 GMT by M : Fixed university name.
In other news, David Bowie is suing for patent infringement, claiming he IS stardust... ok, so it's weak......I'm tired and the coffee maker is broken ;)
Sadly, the sorting and cataloguing procedure was halted today after an inattentive graduate student sneezed the entire collection over the lab
This obviously points to the rumour that nasa has started training old women for the 'space cleanup' - removing all space dust and debris from the upper atmosphere. Old women have several advantages aside from being expert cleaners, they are lightwieght, require little food or sleep, their bones are brittle anyway and they have absorbed enough cherry to keep them radiation-free for months at a time.
If space is a giant vacuum, shouldn't it be picking up all this dust?
Worst. Sig. Ever.
Their intergalactic cries of "Look at this place. Where were you raised? In a barn?" contravene several interstellar conventions on peaceful coexistence.