\n<\/p>\n
How does one acquire star dust? One option, as the Perry Como song suggests, is to catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, so to speak: thousands of tonnes of cosmic dust bombard the Earth each year, mostly vaporising in the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
The asteroid and comet fragments that don\u2019t burn up \u2013 known as meteorites and micrometeorites if they hit Earth \u2013 provide scientists with valuable clues about the cosmos. It\u2019s why planetary scientists in the UK, kitted in ghostbusters-like vacuum backpacks, have scoured cathedral roofs for microscopic specks of the space stuff.<\/p>\n
Another option is to recreate a bit of the universe in a bottle.<\/p>\n
Linda Losurdo, a PhD candidate in materials and plasma physics at the University of Sydney, has done exactly that, producing cosmic dust in the lab from scratch. It\u2019s a feat she hopes will help shed new light on how life began on Earth.<\/p>\n
Cosmic dust is thought to originate from dying stars. A star at the end of its life gets \u201cvery hot and heavy around the outer part\u201d, Losurdo said. Breaking apart under its own pressure, it \u201cstart[s] to belch out \u2026 huge waves of carbon\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is found around the envelopes of giant, dying stars [is] quite similar to what is found in meteorites,\u201d Losurdo said.<\/p>\n
Cosmic dust contains organic compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen \u2013 known collectively as CHON molecules, which form the chemical building blocks of life.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Astrophysicist Dr Sara Webb described Losurdo\u2019s work as \u2018a really beautiful method\u2019 to produce something similar to \u2018what we think interstellar dust is like\u2019.<\/span> Photograph: University of Sydney<\/p>\n Scientists still debate whether the earliest CHON molecules formed locally on Earth, arrived later as particles from comets and asteroids, or were delivered during the early stages of our solar system forming \u2013 or some combination of the three.<\/p>\n Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/p>\n Recreating cosmic dust in the lab may help answer questions about how meteorites hitting Earth came to contain the organic matter that they do, Losurdo said. \u201cWe\u2019re really interested in how we can better predict where the types of dust that we find in meteorite samples came from.\u201d<\/p>\n Cosmic dust emits a distinctive infrared fingerprint, a unique pattern of light that reveals its chemical structure.<\/p>\n In the lab, Losurdo used such patterns to reverse-engineer the dust, first using a vacuum to recreate the near-empty conditions of space in a glass tube.<\/p>\n To the tube, she and her supervisor, Prof David McKenzie of the University of Sydney, introduced a mixture of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and acetylene gas \u2013 \u201cthe types of gases that you would find around giant dying stars\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re then able to apply a very high voltage \u2013 around 10,000 volts \u2013 and \u2026 it energises the gas,\u201d Losurdo said \u2013 creating a type of plasma, the fourth state of matter. \u201cThat is our dust analogue.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr Sara Webb, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University who was not involved in the research, said: \u201cAll of these types of dust particles were the building blocks for our life here on Earth. We wouldn\u2019t be here without them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe know that they exist out there in the universe, all scattered throughout the place, but we obviously can\u2019t go and grab a bit of the dust from the interstellar medium, even though we would love to.\u201d<\/p>\n Webb described Losurdo\u2019s work as \u201ca really beautiful method\u201d to produce something similar to \u201cwhat we think interstellar dust is like\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cOne very exciting possibility, which is probably further down the track is \u2026 to use this kind of simulated cosmic dust in other organic chemistry experiments, to simulate early life formation on different types of planets,\u201d Webb said.<\/p>\n Losurdo emphasised that \u201cwhat we\u2019re making is not representative of every single environment in the universe\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to do is to take a snapshot of something that is physically plausible and see if what we make compares to the real thing.\u201d<\/p>\n The research was published in the Astrophysical Journal of the American Astronomical Society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How does one acquire star dust? One option, as the Perry Como song suggests, is to catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, so to speak: thousands of tonnes of cosmic dust bombard the Earth each year, mostly vaporising in the atmosphere. The asteroid and comet fragments that don\u2019t burn up \u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[1616,3855,2348,5414,10894,4033,11112,337,167,1507,22365,622,4234],"class_list":{"0":"post-43399","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-astronomy","9":"tag-began","10":"tag-catch","11":"tag-cosmic","12":"tag-dust","13":"tag-falling","14":"tag-lab","15":"tag-life","16":"tag-making","17":"tag-reveal","18":"tag-scratch","19":"tag-star","20":"tag-sydney"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/43400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}