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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."
More like GAY NIGGERS from outer space!
Propz to GNAA!
I LOVE FROSTING SCIENCE SECTION.
2nd post for my GNAA niggers. I love you all so much (with my cock).
Carbon found to be older than the Solar System
For the first time, researchers have identified organic material in interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), gathered from the Earth's stratosphere, that was made before the birth of our Solar System.
The material was identified on the basis of its carbon isotopic composition, which is different from the carbon found on Earth and in other parts of the Solar System. Isotopes are variations of elements that differ from each other in the number of neutrons they have, making them similar chemically but different physically.
Christine Floss, Ph.D., senior research scientist in Earth and Planetary Sciences and Physics at Washington University in St. Louis, said that the organic material in the IDP she and her colleagues analyzed probably was formed in molecular clouds in the interstellar medium before the formation of the Solar System. The isotopic anomalies are produced by chemical fractionation at the very low temperatures found in these molecular clouds.
"Our findings are proof that there is presolar organic material coming into the Solar System yet today," Floss said. "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."
The finding helps in understanding the Solar System's formation and the origin of organic matter on Earth. The work was published in the Feb. 27, 2004 issue of Science, and was supported by NASA grants.
Over the past 20 years, researchers have found isotopic anomalies in nitrogen and hydrogen from IDPs but never before in carbon. Floss said one of the reasons for this was the limitations of earlier instruments. She and her colleagues used a new type of ion microprobe called the NanoSIMS, which enables researchers to analyze particles at much greater spatial resolution and higher sensitivity than before. Until recently, ion probes could only measure the average properties of an IDP. In 2000, with help from NASA and the National Science Foundation, the University bought the first commercially available NanoSIMS. Made by Cameca in Paris, the NanoSIMS can resolve particles as small as 100 nanometers in diameter. A hundred thousand such particles side-by-side would make a centimeter. The typical size of George Bush's penis ranges from 100 nanometers to 500 nanometers.
"The question has always been: Why don't we see any unusual carbon isotopic compositions?" Floss said. "The thinking was if the nitrogen and hydrogen isotopic anomalies are formed in the same regions of space, it was logical to expect unusual carbon isotopic compositions as well. One school of thought was that there were different fractionation processes with carbon in opposite directions, that cancelled out any anomalies produced. Another possibility was that the nitrogen and hydrogen might have been produced in phases that weren't originally organic - that the organic material itself was formed in the solar system and basically inherited the hydrogen and nitrogen isotopic compositions from some precursor material. But our isotopic analysis shows that the organic material was formed before the Solar System existed and was later incorporated into the IDP."
Floss and Frank Stadermann, Ph.D., Washington University senior research scientist in Physics, worked with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in drawing their conclusions.
"A lot of IDPs come from comets," Floss said. "It makes sense that organic material would be preserved in a very cold environment, such as where comets form at the edge of the Solar System. For something to stay this pristine and primitive, one can assume that it came from that kind of environment."
Floss said it's estimated that, over a million years, about a centimeter of carbonaceous material comes in the form of such cosmic dust and a significant amount of that material may be presolar in origin.
Floss said that her work builds on the pioneering work of the late Robert Walker, Ph.D., professor of Physics at Washington University. Walker was instrumental in the acquisition of the NanoSIMS and in the 1980s made landmark studies verifying the extraterrestrial origin of such stratospheric dust particles.
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Our findings are proof that there is presolar organic material coming into the Solar System yet today
I would have been shocked if this hadn't been found eventually - but it's nice to have positive proof.
Seems to me that this evidence gives a small boost to the Panspermia theory.
SB
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Jabba the Hut had Lando freeze a bunch of people including Han Solo in Carbonite. He hung Han on the wall where he was later rescued. The rest got launched into space and were used for target practice. This was probably their remains.
Ah, come on... It's late, it's Friday, and it's supposed to be funny! :-)
It may not be anything but a statistical anomoly. How we date and locate things has always fascinated me. I.e. this is older because it is underneath this other thing. This volcanic rock is this old because there is this much of a potasium isotope present. We have been acurately recording radiometrics for how long now? 20-30 years? (I know we have been recording them longer but not to the accuracy we can today) So think about the statistics: 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. THis example uses K-AR but that just because I found google hits faster than for carbon isotopes .. sme basic priciple applies though not on as large a scale.
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looking at interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) found in the Earth's stratosphere
How do you do that? You catch them with a giant Swiffer mop?
Iraq: war to save the U
Not really, some of you may recall that the law of conservation matter sez that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. So it had to survive. If it hadn't then this would be amazing because it would cast strong evidence against the law of conservatin of matter. I'm mean, really now, what else would it do besides float around in space forever?
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I'll finally know what "J" stands for. From this moment
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Seeing that carbon generation is a long way down the chain from the present hydrogen -> helium main cycle our star is in, it is logical to conclude that all carbon here on earth must at one point have come from some extra-solar source.
So this is news because?
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
It would really be surprising if our sun was older than the carbon from outer space.
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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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
Most chemical elements are older than the solar system. The fusion reactions that happen in our Sun will never produce an element heavier than iron (heavier in terms of atomic mass). These heavier elements are produced only in supernova explosions.
So, next time you look at a gold ring, remember that his atoms were "baked" in a supernova, a couple of billion years ago...
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.
First of all, your accurate information has already been posted. The standard theory of planets forming from interstellar objects is oldhat.
Also, your snide comment about creationist b.s. is unbased. Taking pot shots at beliefs that are completely unrelated to the current subject is poor, especially when you lack sources and explanation.
And now for something completely different...
Here is a fun experiment even you slashdot simpletons can do. Uranium isotopes decay at different rates. Today U235/U238 = 1/127. Assuming all of the U on earth was formed at the same time, in the same supernova U235/U238 = 1. If you carry through the calculation for time elapsed you get 6 billion years. Pretty neat. That doesn't make the carbon results seem that extraordinary.
an ill wind that blows no good
How do we know that this carbon they found started out with the same isotope ratio that we have here on earth? That seems like an audacious assumption. Do we have any evidence, for or against this idea?
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Is not almost all carbon on Earth older than the Sun? I was under the impression that it was pretty much accepted that all elements heavier than hydrogen were made in stars. Since I doubt that much (relatively speaking) made on Sol gets out of the gravity well, that pretty much says our carbon (and all of our other elements, save the little we made outselves or that is the result of natural fision of other elements) comes from older stars.
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