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The interstellar dust particles found in Earth’s upper atmosphere are older than our 4.6 billion-year-old solar system. Scientists say that these particles could teach us a lot about how planets and stars are formed.
As per a report by Science Alert, the discovery was made by an international team of scientists led by Hope Ishii, from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The scientists are confident that these particles are the foundation materials that make up the planetary bodies in our solar system. This is undoubtedly a great discovery for anyone interested in the origins of the universe.
The report quoted Hope Ishii as saying, “Our observations suggest that these exotic grains represent surviving pre-solar interstellar dust that formed the very building blocks of planets and stars. If we have at our fingertips the starting materials of planet formation from 4.6 billion years ago, that is thrilling and makes possible a deeper understanding of the processes that formed and have since altered them.”
The team used infrared light and electron microscopes to analyse the samples collected by NASA’s Stratospheric aircraft. The aircraft collected particles burned off comets that had eventually settled high up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The scientists focussed at a subgroup of glassy particles called GEMS (glass with embedded metal and sulphides). GEMS measure a few hundred nanometres across – approximately less than a hundredth of the thickness of a human hair.
They found that the grains were fused together in an environment cold and rich with radiation – something similar to the outer solar nebula or the cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium, and other ionised gases out of which the Solar System formed.
Jim Ciston, a researcher from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory explains that the presence of specific types of organic carbon indicates that the formation process might have occurred at low temperatures. He says, “These interplanetary dust particles survived from the time before [the] formation of the planetary bodies in the Solar System, and provide insight into the chemistry of those ancient building blocks.”
This research certainly opens the doors to understanding the origins of our universe better.
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