Nanodiamonds Are Not Forever

An anonymous reader writes "Livermore Labs and the Belgian Institute of Astrophysics (Catholic University, Leuven) are reporting today that nanodiamonds trapped by U2 spyplanes are pretty common (one part per 1000 in meteors), but don't originate from violent supernovae as previously thought. Instead their absence in comets suggest they formed after our solar system (are not pre-solar) by chemical vapor deposition -- and from much less violent asteroid collisions. Their technique of spectroscopy is compared to looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack by burning down the haystack. It seems these diamond time capsules are close to perfect tracers for guessing the initial conditions when life first formed in the universe. On April 23-24, a large flux of identifiable comet dust will streak through our stratosphere from the Grigg-Skjellerup earth-crossing dust trail."