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.

Comments

Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Washington University in St. Louis...

*not* "University of Washington"

In Other News

[choctawgh]

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 ;)

Update: Project cancelled

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, the sorting and cataloguing procedure was halted today after an inattentive graduate student sneezed the entire collection over the lab

Washington University, Actually.

[cbowland]

Washington University

cleanup

[bobba22]

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.

How do people figure this stuff out?

[guacamolefoo]

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.

Re:How do people figure this stuff out?

[CheshireCatCO]

The usual way to trace the place of origin of a sample (meteorites, dust, whatever) is to look at the ratio of isotopes of certain elements. In this case, they used two oxygen isoptopes. Objects in our solar system tend to have a particular ratio, all the material having formed from the same nebula 4.6 billion years ago. Material with a very different isotope ratio probably comes from outside the system, then.

This method isn't without it's risks, of course. There are processes which might enhance or deplete a body in a particular isotope over it's kin. But I'm not thinking of any that would work on a dust grain, assuming it had ever been part of a planet.

A few corrections, sir

[(1337) God]

A few corrections, sir:

1. We lost 7 people in the Columbia disaster, not 8.
   
2. It exploded over Earth, not Middle Earth. Perhaps you should re-join the real and stay away from your sci-fi fantasy movies.
   
3. I know this is hard to believe, but it's Iraq that we're going to invade, not Iran. Iran is so '80s.
   
4. The world will never be totally fixed. That's why we need to study Space and find out how to get the hell off Earth before it's too late ;-)

Why is space so dirty?

[Mothra the III]

If space is a giant vacuum, shouldn't it be picking up all this dust?

Re:Why is space so dirty?

[dmomo]

Why? Did you ever try looking inside of your vacuum cleaner? If anything, I would expect space to be full of pennies, pens and missing G.I. Joe weapons.

One major problem

[burgburgburg]

Their intergalactic cries of "Look at this place. Where were you raised? In a barn?" contravene several interstellar conventions on peaceful coexistence.

Re: Skeptical

[thelexx]

A little reading would go a long way in your search for truth.

From the linked article:

Using the NanoSIMS probe, the Washington University investigators then measured the relative amounts of two isotopes of oxygen in more than a thousand grains from nine IDPs. The data told them which grains had come from stars.

From a link in the article:

The NanoSIMS is a first-of-its-kind ion microprobe in the Laboratory for Space Sciences in Arts & Sciences and is housed on the fourth floor of Compton Hall. The $2 million instrument is the first in the world built to analyze the isotopic and elemental composition of extremely small samples, such as interplanetary dust particles, at a sub-micrometer scale, allowing a first-time look at those particles' subcomponents.

And from a link on the NanoSIMS homepage:

Results: Of all the subgrains defined in 25 images from 9 cluster IDPs, roughly 1031 were measured with sufficient precision to distinguish solar material from circumstellar dust as shown in Figure 1. Only grains > 200 nm were measured with this level of precision. Six of these grains have O isotopic compositions which fall well outside the range of solar system materials, marking them as stellar condensates.

Seems to me like these cats know what they are doing.

Re:well,

[mmol_6453]

Why bother, when we have craters on Earth to look at instead? The point is that we haven't been there, we haven't specifically looked at the object, so we technically don't know what it is.

You see, that's science. Other examples might be...

• ...why did we send flyby probes to other planets when an orbital telescope could tell us just as much?
• ...why spend money on an orbital telescope when we see** just as much from higher-altitude observatories?

How long would it have been before we were sure about about the Van Allen radiation belts, if we we hadn't sent probes up to check?

(**) Yes, I know you have to deal with refraction and diffraction and turbulance and clouds, but we've got technology to deal with all of that now.

Re:That's Washington University, moron

[idiot900]

I go to Washington University right now. We Wash U people are used to this. Anytime we talk to family they say things like "Seattle is pretty rainy isn't it?" You'd think more people would have heard of a major research university with billions of dollars in its endowment. Sadly this is not the case. No love lost, we understand :)