NASA Detects Alien Dust

[Dryson]

http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/16/tech/cosmic-dust-nasa-cassini-irpt/index.html

(CNN)NASA just discovered some special particles floating in our cosmic neighborhood.

The Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, has detected alien dust that came from outside our solar system.

A very interesting article to read. I wonder what the dust is comprised of?

 

[lpetrich]

Saturn Spacecraft Samples Interstellar Dust | NASA

Importantly, unlike Ulysses and Galileo, Cassini was able to analyze the composition of the dust for the first time, showing it to be made of a very specific mixture of minerals, not ice. The grains all had a surprisingly similar chemical make-up, containing major rock-forming elements like magnesium, silicon, iron and calcium in average cosmic proportions. Conversely, more reactive elements like sulfur and carbon were found to be less abundant compared to their average cosmic abundance.

"Cosmic dust is produced when stars die, but with the vast range of types of stars in the universe, we naturally expected to encounter a huge range of dust types over the long period of our study," said Frank Postberg of the University of Heidelberg, a co-author of the paper and co-investigator of Cassini's dust analyzer.

This is unlike interstellar grains in meteorites. Those grains have a variety of compositions. The researches suggest that these grains got processed in the interstellar medium, like by supernova shock fronts.