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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.
You mean Washington University in St. Louis...
*not* "University of Washington"
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
Washington University
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
How the heck do they know that the dust is from a whole 'nother solar system?
Sincerely,
David Bowie
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
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.
When collected at high-altitude, the origin of six grains are from outside our solar system.
IIRC, someone once wrote that "...even God cannot tell carbon atoms apart." How do you pull something from the upper atmosphere and conclusively determine that it came from outside the solar system? Perhaps it would help to RTFA (and I will) but it just baffles me how these scientists are able to figure this stuff out. I'm starting to fall into that "Science as magic" category, I guess.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
For some reason, I thought the hardest stardust to get was the one at the home of the gigantos. I had to go back and look everywhere to find that one... but it's definitely worth it for what Martel gives you when you have all 50.
.. had god been smart and made the universe and everything within it with RFID tags. Imagine the possibilities ...
"Old man yells at systemd"
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Wonderful. I suppose Project Wildfire will be activated shortly, following the mysterious death of all but two people (a baby and an old man) living in a desert town somewhere...
Perhaps this time they won't hire any epileptics.
The official name of the school is Washington University in Saint Louis. At least get the name of the school right. That's like calling Harvard University the "University of Harvard". You sound like a moron to anyone who went there.
For future reference it is NOT any of the following:
University of Washington
Washinton State University
Western Washington Universty
Central Washington University
George Washington University
Washington and Lee University
I collected a whole bunch of it, but then all I got was this armor...
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
If space is a giant vacuum, shouldn't it be picking up all this dust?
Worst. Sig. Ever.
only 100 billion
Once you've seen one comet, you've seen em all.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Makes me want to break out the +1 Vorpal Sword.
I found it interesting that commercial mining of asteroids was mentioned in the third article. Sure, raw materials are plentiful in asteroids, but wouldn't the cost of getting there far outweigh the benefits of the plentiful resources? I guess this would be practical if/when we run out of certain ores, or as an "While we're here, we might as well" measure, but I can't see it going anywhere otherwise until the price of space travel drops dramatically.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
"...including the Stardust mission..."
:)
Ziggy learned to play guitar, flying high with...
etc...
sorry, had to do it.
-r-
And it sounded just fine to me. So to anyone that didn't go there, you sound like a moron making a big deal about nothing... especially when we click on the article and see the correction....
i'm sure i'm the thirty-seventh person to point
this out, but the University of Washington is in
Washington, and Washington University is in St.
Louis. this article is refering the Washington
University, which is located in St. Louis, MO.
Now, I know the articles I'm about to site are about identifying possible extra-terrestrial life, but I believe that calling atmospheric dust extra-solar is just as specious.
The first article is about the supposed space bacteria collected off of a weather balloon at high altitudes. You've got to be kidding me... That stuff did not just float thousands of light years just to get caught and identified off a weather balloon not even in space.
The second article concerns the Murchison meteorite. This one they know came from outer space and still cant tell whether it had Earthy or Non-Earthy critters living inside.
My point is that the possibility of contamination and disturbance of the results in experiments looking at both organic and inorganic compounds is astronomical (pardon the pun). I agree with an above post: some grad student didn't wash his hands after going to the bathroom and touched a sample.
I even have his 80's "Fashion" stuff. I do miss the Spiders from Mars...
(sigh)
I suggest they check out the moon's craters for the dust residue from asteroid impacts...
this is not a sig.
isn't stardust a WWE wrestler??
oh wait, thats golddust......ahh, golddust, stardust, whatever; they're all ferry dust anyway....
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
Their intergalactic cries of "Look at this place. Where were you raised? In a barn?" contravene several interstellar conventions on peaceful coexistence.
> Once you've seen one comet, you've seen em all.
I dunno about that. On Star Trek last year, they had a comet with earthlike gravity. Now that's damned impressive, and it must be true since its on TV.
Maybe there are other unique comets out there, like ones with bizarre technobabble-inhibiting EM fields and occasional spaceberry orchards. ^_^
-JC
...assuming it had ever been part of a planet.
So, at some point in time, billions and billions of years from now, the atoms that make up myself will be drifting around the cosmos blown out by the destruction of the earth by the red-giant death of our sun.
To be picked up and analyzed by some alien scientist who determines that their planet wasn't the only one to invent pizza.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Why don't they just take a crap, cough or scrape some skin and examine that. Aren't we all supposed to be stardust from expired stars, according I guess to the new age people, or Babylon 5.
The pulsars in my head keep throbbing.
> I found it interesting that commercial mining of asteroids was mentioned
> in the third article. Sure, raw materials are plentiful in asteroids,
> but wouldn't the cost of getting there far outweigh the benefits
> of the plentiful resources? I guess this would be practical if/when
> we run out of certain ores, or as an "While we're here, we might
> as well" measure, but I can't see it going anywhere otherwise
> until the price of space travel drops dramatically.
Yeah, it's an "economy of scale" thing. Once we have regular (and by regular I mean many companies each making daily launches) access to space, the incremental cost of space travel will be far, far below what we pay now in terms of cost per unit mass.
And, thing is, it doesn't cost much in terms of energy to get to any given asteroid once you're outside the gravity well of Earth. The only cost would really be time, since momentum keeps you going until you want to brake. So you start up a pipeline of automated mining probes to Ceres. Much like on modern microprocessors, the initial hardware cost would be greater, but you'd be able to transport mining materials at a much faster and more reliable rate than you otherwise would.
And mining in a low gravity environment (Ceres, the largest asteroid, has less than a thirtieth of Earth's surface gravity) should be far less energy intensive than mining on Earth, where you have to expend unbelievable amounts of energy to merely move mined elements from the mines to the transports, and where you're severely limited in machine travel range due to friction related to that nasty 9.8m/s^2 that we have to put up with all the time here.
And some asteroids will probably have minable minerals in abundance, and remote spectral analysis will be able to allow us to identify mineral compositions from millions of miles away. That does away with a huge portion of the work involved in mining on Earth, where you have to often indirectly figure out what minerals are hidden beneath the surface, wasting time by drilling all over the place. That costs money continuously, and you could save on that with asteroid mining.
There are probably some other things in asteroid mining that I'm not thinking of. I'm not miner, and my "engineering" knowledge is rather amateurish (I'm more of a theoretical guy, being a programmer and all). Maybe wear and tear of machines would be less (due to both that lesser gravity we discussed above and the total lack of atmosphere or microorganisms to break down the machine parts). Maybe there are social benefits, like higher morale for the folks who like to work in larger and more open environments (this century, maybe "getting away from it all" will mean accepting a job that lets you work fifty million miles away for a year or two).
Economies of scale, my man. We have to force ourselves to pay the high costs to continue the proliferation of new technology. I we don't do this, we go stagnant. Space launches these days are often more expensive than they were in the old days, even when you take inflation into account. It's because we stopped doing them so often. It saves a few billion dollars a year in the short term. But we might have made back those billions -- and far more -- by now from the direct and indirect benefits of building up an economy-of-scale framework of space travel. I mean, heck, we landed on Luna six years before I was born. We have space probes ten light hours away. We also have advanced manufacturing facilities on Earth now. Had we continued our push into space instead of borking it all in the seventies through the nineties, I imagine that we would have simple factories producing complex objects on the cheap (at least with products that require tons of work on a small amount of raw material -- no friction and no gravity equals huge cost reductions!) now. Chip fabbing companies would be looking at near to medium term options for building astro-fabs. Do you realize how much more precision in the sub-nanometer range you'd get in building chips when you don't have to worry about gravity and vibrations from the local landmass and atmospheric variables? I mean, crap, we probably would be able to further accelerate process shrinks. 3.0GHz on a 130nm process? What a backwards technology for a space-enabled 2003!
Economies of scale, my man. Startup costs are [almost] always prohibitive. That's how science and technology works. Live with it. But don't work to inhibit it.
-JC
Stardust, by Mitchell Parish and Hoagy Carmichael -- the most beautiful song ever written.
-kgj
The Oort cloud is only a proposal the explain what cannot be explained by the alleged billion-year age of the solar system. See this page for a short description. It says this about the Oort Cloud: "The very existence of the Oort Cloud is only a working hypothesis. Our only evidence is very indirect."
It's full of dust!
I can't rememebr who said it, but is true. Once youre in orbit, the rest is easy.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
They find the isotope of element 36 in solid form which does not occur on earth at normal temperatures and pressures. If you hold this material next some kinds of aliens, it makes them weak and eventually kills them.
Also, heavy elements like gold and platinum are concentrated in earth's core; the heave stuff settled there when the earth was formed. Metal asteroids would have significantly higher concentrations of the good stuff. I've read that a good-sized near-earth iron/nickel asteroid would be worth $20 trillion wholesale, with about $4 trillion being economically viable to return to Earth (i.e. metals like gold, platinum). Also I seem to recall the world's largest nickel mine, in Canada, is actually the remnants of an iron/nickel asteroid that hit long ago.
> Your post makes an excellent argument for the
... automated mining probes ... Ceres ... microprocessors ... faster ... more reliable rate", and they might be able to make out the general gist of what I was talking about. I probably should have added a boldfaced term like "high initial investment" to balance out what I was saying there, but I was writing a lot of stuff on the fly. This isn't a term paper or a news article, you know. :p
:)
> banning of font weight variations in body text.
> Of course, no one expects good typography on
> Slashdot, home of the all-italics front page.
Heh. I do that for a reason. I've found that I tend to drone on when I write stuff, so many readers get bored before they can get to the meat of what I'm saying. So I try to highlight (well, make bold) words that represent the important points of the paragraphs. Some readers (granted, not all) find it easy to quickly scan a long post if they can pick out important key words.
For instance, when I said "So you start up a pipeline of automated mining probes to Ceres. Much like on modern microprocessors, the initial hardware cost would be greater, but you'd be able to transport mining materials at a much faster and more reliable rate than you otherwise would", a speed reader would see the boldfaced words " pipeline
Granted, I stole this technique from Mad and Cracked magazines, so it might not be the best approach.
-JC
woo! i want intergalactic G.I. Joe weapons too!
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
The Italics make perfect sense though - its the part of the posting which isnt in 'present tense speech'.
-- NeTMoNGeR
how much of the dust in my house came from outer space?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Well, it's probably be worth a good bit less since in selling it you'd significantly reduce the sale price (even if you petered it out over a century).
The real problem is still economic. It just doesn't have a good enough rate of return. Presume it costs a mere $30B to design, develop, and deploy a system to secure and exploit a nickel-metal NEAR as suggested. If it takes you 20 years to do this, and then you play the asteroid out over another century, what's your rate of return when you sell the goods for $4T?
Well, if you took that $30B of initial investment and let it grow at 5% APR, compounding daily, it would turn into $1,206,780B after 120 years.
So, uh... you just cut your return by over 3000 times. Ouch. Big, big, big ouch.
That's the real big problem with space exploration - it takes so long that it becomes unviable economically. And these numbers don't even take risk into account, and they're probably low on a factor of 10x - it would probably cost closer to $300B to develop that first successful mining strategy, if not more. There's a lot of hard problems to crack first.
Of course, this doesn't touch on other reasons to do this kind of thing, but then you're appealing to other desires. Raw economics is not a good reason to go into space... it's a really lousy one. But I still want to go there.
I had picked up Stephen Hawkings' "A Brief History of Time" from the library, but stopped reading it...
Do a google for stephen-hawking-a-brief-history-of-time.pdf and download a copy. It's easily found and worth reading in full.
Most of modern astrophysics isn't scientific, in fact.
As someone who studied astrophysics at university, I can honestly say that statement is just bull. Yes, astrophysics is mainly a theoretical science, but that doesn't make the science any less valid.
The fact that you couldn't get through reading A Brief History Of Time without dismissing its contents as "anything more than fantasy" suggests to me that you're the kind of person who doens't have the capacity for anything other than simple thought.
I'll ask you two simple questions that illustrate just how dependent science in general is on theories:
Q: How do you know that the Earth is round? (Ie, how can you prove it?)
Q: How do you know that gravity exists? (Again, prove its existance.)
Observational astronomy has helped astrophysicists prove and refine their theories. Want proof of the effect of gravity on light as predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity? Then just look at gravitational lensing caused by the Sun. Etc, etc.
Astrophysics may be a relatively new science (it's less than a hundred years old) but it's backed up by astronomy (the oldest science) pretty damn well.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
They don't. They don't have any way of knowing it's from another solar system, since they have never been in another solar system.
I've never been to a different continent. I have a stuffed goldfish that's from a different continent. I can tell by reading its tag. Yes, really. It could have been made here, but that would mean that it was sold with a fake tag, which is very unlikely given the effort required to produce one, and without a legitimate tag, because someone would have had to remove the original, which is unlikely because I see no evidence of that. Likewise, the dust particles have tags (oxygen isotope ratios). To have a very different ratio would require a great deal of effort, along the lines of a naturally occuring gaseous diffusion isotope seperator, plus any deposits of oxygen atoms at the original ratio would have to be removed, which would also leave evidence.
We have no way of knowing whether the [background microwave] radiation is just inherent to our solar system, galaxy, or even planet. In fact, it is most likely that the instruments themselves are the problem.
Let's first assume that the radiation comes from a spherical shell that surrounds us. If the shell enclosed just our planet, we would see minor changes in intensity at different altitudes. If it enclosed just our solar system, we would see minor changes in intensity as we orbited the sun. If it enclosed just our galaxy, we would see minor directional changes in intensity as look in different directions (since we aren't at the galatic center). Now let's assume that the radiation comes from a fog that we're embedded within. In this case, we would see the radiation even when looking at something that would block it (the moon, distant galaxies, etc), but we don't. Finally, if the instruments are the problem, we would see differences as we used different instruments.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
My tag analogy makes lots of sense. I don't know which country my stuffed animal is from, because I can't read the label. I can, however, tell that the label isn't from any country using the Latin character set. Likewise, we can't tell what star created the dust particles, but we can tell that it isn't from around here.
The only planet in our solar system that could be the source of either particles or radiation such as you describe would be Pluto. We've sent robots to all of the others without seeing anything such as you describe. When you can provide a mechanism that explains how a cold object that's closer in size to an asteroid than a planet could do this, people will listen. Also, those robots have also mapped the solar systems magnetic fields, so the idea that magnetic fields somehow redirect point-source radiation to appear to come from all directions equally doesn't hold water, either. As for non-magnetic fields, gravity fields large enough to do the job would have other visible side-effects on planetary orbits, while quantum fields don't have the range.
It takes the Sun a lot of effort to produce heat. Effort means work, which has a precise formula for its calculation. Or don't you think that those descriptions of "the equivalent of X million atomic bombs going off every second" denote anything?
If a narrow-band radiation-emitting "fog" were part of empty space, we would see evidence in several ways. Depending on the scale, stars or galaxies would appear different to us according to their distance. If local phenomena cleared away the fog close to us (in an astronomical sense), the fog would appear to be more shell-like and we would observe shell-like effects, unless we are at the exact center of the shell. That seems unlikely, since we aren't anywhere near the center of the solar system, our arm of the galaxy, or the local cluster of galaxies.
Soviet scientists observed the same radiation as Western scientists using instruments built with very different technologies. The only thing that they have in common are Maxwell's equations, which seem to work well enough for designing your TV set and the ICs in your computer. If you can provide equations that work exactly like Maxwell's except for predicting the spurious reception of frequencies identical to the cosmic black-body radiation, people will listen.
A lot of science works like counting cards in blackjack. For instance, once all the face cards have been dealt, you don't have to physically examine the deck to know that you won't bust on a twelve. Likewise, science sees certain phenomena and reaches certain conclusions about the nature of the universe, without having to travel beyond our solar system. The same conclusions that led to the development of your freezer or cellphone also led to certain deductions about the nature of the universe. Now, I'll admit the possibility that the game is rigged. Maybe electricity is a fraud to steal my money. Maybe gnomes stuff ice in the walls of my freezer when I'm not looking. Maybe when I talk on my cell phone, I really talking to a very tiny parrot (cared for nightly by those same gnomes) who uses telepathy to communicate with other parrots in other cell phones.
Somehow, though, I doubt it.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
behaviorism has all the same problems you point out in astrophysics. first, there is observer bias (all observers are humans, and they are studying humans themselves). in order to truly observe human behavior qua the phenomenon of human behavior you would need a non-human observer capable of making observations in non-human terms. secondly, only a very, very, small statistical sample can ever be observed in a scientific manner, unless you can show me a way to study the behavior of 6,000,000,000+ people in a laboratory setting.
my pet machine
...it's full of dust...!
(sorry, couldn't help it)
~sabine
"if your brain had an ass, i'd kick it"
The microwave radiation is blueshifted in the direction our galaxy appears to be moving in relation to points at the edge of the visible universe, after correcting for blueshifts from our motion around the sun and the sun's course through the galaxy. This rather handily shows the source of the microwave radiation to be outside our galaxy. If you blame it on the instruments themselves, then you have to come up with a theory that explains how the instruments produce anomolous readings that correspond exactly with the extra-galactic point they happen to be aimed at at the moment (versus what planet, local star, geomagnetic longitude, etc. they are pointed at). And the source of the microwaves isn't claimed by astrophysicists to be "distant stars everywhere." It is obvious that you don't know enough about the theories or the instruments and observations that stimulated them to discount them. Part of science is to come up with theories that explain observations. No where is it implied that the theories have to be whole and perfect or even correct, just that they explain all the evidence gathered so far. If we could send probes to distant galaxies and they showed that the Milky Way was responsible for all the microwave radiation, then the theories would be rewritten and /. user Angram crowned as a visionary. But don't hold your breath.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Yeah, but if you brought back a solid platinum asteroid the size of a house, the price of platinum would drop making it just a worthless chunk of metal(is platinum good for anything besides being rare and therefore expensive?).
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Everybody run!!! Somebody call wildfire.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Yes! Platinum is (or would be) incredibly useful in all sorts of applications. Unfortunately, it is also rare and therefore expensive. Ditto radium and gold and various other rare elements which could have much better uses than lining bank vaults.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Platinum is very nice for fuel cells. I'd be willing to bet that in a hydrogen based energy economy a house sized chunk of platinum would go for a lot.
Many metals are pretty rare in the earth's crust; there's no way to tell what commercial applications for these metals would appear if they were abundant enough to meet commercial demands, even at a couple hundred bucks an ounce.