Comet chasers get mineral shock
Stardust mission yields white hot results.
The first results from a mission to catch dust from a comet's tail have revealed a surprise: these balls of dirty snow are born of fire as well as ice. Scientists were stunned to find a huge range of minerals in the particles captured by NASA's Stardust probe as it swooped past the comet Wild 2 on 2 January 2004. Many of the compounds could only have formed close to a star - far from the chilly outskirts of the Solar System where the comet first coalesced.
Read the news@nature.com story (you'll need a password) here.
And see all blog entries from the conference here.
Comments
I was the first person to publish a refereed paper that suggested the solar nebula was processed by a solar bipolar outflow. Michael Brown and I also predicted, over 10 years ago, that a major proportion of solar nebula dust would be processed in the inner nebula and then ejected by an outflow to the outer parts of the nebula (see section 6 of the paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0602383 ).
The recent stardust results do not prove that our ideas are/were correct, but they are certainly consistent with the general theory that we have outlined.
Sincerely, Kurt Liffman
CSIRO/MIT
Posted by: Kurt Liffman | March 24, 2006 01:07 PM