Carbon From Outer Space Older Than Our Sun

Roland Piquepaille writes "While looking at interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) found in the Earth's stratosphere, researchers from the Washington University in St. Louis have found carbon older than the Solar System. They identified the organic material by its carbon isotopic composition, different from the one of carbon found on Earth. "Our findings are proof that there is presolar organic material coming into the Solar System yet today," said Christine Floss, the leading scientist. "This material has been preserved for more than 4.5 billion years, which is the age of the Solar System. It's amazing that it has survived for so long." This overview contains more details and references. It also contains pictures including the one of a sample's isotopic structure at a sub-micrometer scale."

Comments

isotopic ratios

[gumbi west]

here is the isotopic ratio here on earth.

• 98.90 % C-12
• 1.10 % C-13

Re:About time

[xilmaril]

and for those not familier with the subject (ie most people)

Svante Arrhenius theorized that bacterial spores propelled through space by light pressure were the seeds of life on Earth. British astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe rekindled interest in panspermia. They also proposed that comets, which are largely made of water-ice, carry bacterial life across galaxies and protect it from radiation damage along the way. Not necessarily a view I subscribe to, but an interesting one nevertheless.

by Theorellior, of Everything2.com

The Cosmic Recycling Center

[Rob Riggs]

They are called stars: fusion, E=mc^2, supernovae. Behold the power of the atom.

Oh, and those theoretical apparitions called black holes -- the great Insinkerators in the sky.

Re:May not mean anything(Epistemology of HalfLife)

[G4from128k]

It may not be anything but a statistical anomoly. How we date and locate things has always fascinated me. .... We look at the decay across 30 years and immediately say it must have a half life of 1.251 billion years? excuse me but thats a pretty small sample rate for my tastes.

I see your point and agree that using science to know the past is very tricky. In the case of measuring half-lives, the methods are statistically accurate because of the huge sample size in atoms. If you start with 6 x 10^23 atoms and time how long it takes a billion of them to decay, you get a very accurate estimate of the decay rate. That the experiment only watches the atoms for a billioth of a half-life is less important that the fact that it counts the activity of such a large sample size of atoms.

But the problem you are alluding to is deeper than that. Although we can be statistically confident that the half-life of K40 is 1.251 billion years currently, that measurement gives us no proof that it has always been 1.251 billion years. For that we need accurate measurements of half-life at two widely separated times (and as you say, we've only been doing that for a few decades).

IANAP, so perhaps some astrophysicist here can enlighten us on how we know that the laws of physics dont change. Based on the invariance of spectral lines, I suspect that we can be confident that the eletromagnetic force has been constant over time (even here I wonder if its possible to change the laws of physics to mimic a redshift). But how do we know that the weak force and strong force have remained constant over the life span of the universe? For example, is there a way to accurately measure the half-life of elements spawned by billion light-year distant supernovae?

Finally, it may be that changes in half-life over galatic timescales are irrelevant and long as all half-lives change by the same factor. A consistent shift in half-lives would mess up the numerical dates, but not disturb the order. Thus, we may know that the carbon is older than our solar system, but be off in our numerical estimate of the age of the solar system.

duh...

[Free_Meson]

All of the carbon (and iron and nitrogen and oxygen and silicon and etc other than H, He, and maybe some Li and Be) on earth is older than the solar system, save for some fraction fo the above formed by radioactive decay. The solar system has no viable method to create and deposit significant amounts of (say) carbon on the earth, therefore any carbon here was here before the solar system condensed. It would be more newsworthy if the carbon were significantly newer than the solar system.

I haven't RTFA'd yet, but even if the significance of this carbon is that it has some special chemical form, there's no reason to assume that this bonding took place before the earth formed, as the component atoms would decay at the same rate, resulting in the same isotope ratios whether they were bonded or not...

The universe is something of an open sewer, filled with the waste products of billions of billions of exploded stars. It's not surprising that we picked up some of that trash, or that some of that trash is older than the trash that made us. IMHO this is of significant interest only because it sticks yet another fork in the creationist b.s.

Re:Well.

[John Hasler]

The Solar System formed out of a single gas and dust cloud resulting from one or more supernovas. This cloud had a characteristic isotopic composition. The carbon these researchers have found has a different composition and so must have originated in a different dust cloud.